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There are a few of ways that an external hard drive might fail. The motor might quit, the read/write heads might crash into the platter surface due to shock while operating, or the electronics might overheat and go belly up. You might get a warning in the form of strange noises such as a scraping or grinding sound. If the data is particularly important, turn it off immediately and call a recovery service. That scraping sound may be the coating on the platter being removed by a crashed head. This is unrecoverable. If you keep running it, back it up immediately and replace it. SSDs generally go

While mechanical hard drives are much more prone to failure than SSDs, it is still possible for an SSD to give up the ghost. Generally it's the result of a controller failure, although that's an increasingly rare occurrence; it's also a relatively easy fix/reset for someone who knows the SSD's internals such as a recovery service.SSDs will also eventually wear out, though this only precludes further writing to the unit. You can still read what's on the drive, so it's not the disaster a HDD failure can be. There were also instances in the ancient past of static electricity bricking Type-A conne