Make sure that you keep your disks cool. I believe high temperatures are a major factor in disk failure.

I try to remember to stand a USB drive on edge in such a way that I don't accidently knock it over. It keeps several degrees cooler that way.

I use Hard Disk Sentinel to monitor my disks.

I don't want to fan the brand-flame wars at all, but I lost a Seagate a couple of years ago. 4TB external, when they were pretty new. I bought two of them to allow for exact backups of everything.

Except I failed to backup duirng the course of finishing a project. We finished a project, delivered a 2-disc master set to the client for replication, and then the drive failed. Seems like it was within 6 months of purchse. Cost of data recovery from Seagate, north of $2400 as I recall. I held my breath. The client replicated and sold through, and I put the drive on the shelf as a reminder.

I have a Seagate that is no longer attached to the computer. I need to copy it to something more reliable as it is clicking like a time bomb.

Potential disk failure can be managed if you discipline yourself to do appropriate backups sufficiently often.

Make a backup copy of your source data on a separate disk. Save your Vegas project file(s) often to separate disks. The worst you can lose is the editing since the last project save. Saving a project file only takes a moment, so it is easy to do often.

My next Hard Drives will be for source files and Vegas alone. Is it wise to have automatic backups or best to do it manually?

"Potential disk failure can be managed if you discipline yourself to do appropriate backups sufficiently often."

That's the answer. No matter the manufacturer, drives will fail. So it's best to be proactive about backing up.

I tend to use WD blue drives in pairs, then do a software raid 1. This works very well with Vegas, add PTRG you can monitor and alert for for drive errors. With software raid, you maintain SMART reporting.

Backups are clearly the best protection.

Does anyone know if spinite works? I have an old Seagate drive, that went clicky fail and needs recovery.

I'm a Spinrite owner, primarily in support of Steve Gibson's work creating free tools for internet security and his Security Now podcasts with Leo Laporte.

Spinrite is a valuable, effective tool in both recovering and maintaining hard drives. (It will refresh data on a drive by rewriting it, which has the effect of strengthening weak sectors and improves subsequent O/S reads. This can significantly speed access to areas that were formerly difficult to read.) It's capable of resurrecting drives that have errors that can't be read by Windows or Linux tools. It does this with a number of very low level operations that bypass BIOS routines and address the drive directly. It's an exceptionally small program written entirely in machine code, clocking in, as I recall, at just under 200K.

I have used it to read data from a drive that died several years ago, and wasn't even visible to my computer when attached via USB converter. I held onto the drive after it died because I couldn't remember what was on it, but there was a project that I couldn't locate anywhere else, and assumed that it was on this drive and gone for good. So when I bought Spinrite earlier this year, I was delighted to see this drive come back to life, even if it's only long enough to copy the data to a fresh drive.

Spinrite is often praised as a miracle worker, but it doesn't work in every situation. Unfortunately, drives that fail with 'the click' normally have a hardware failure that produces this clicking noise, and this often prevents the correct positioning of the heads. If the heads can't be controlled, nothing is going to read the data.

Purchasing Spinrite is, IMO, a good investment for disaster recovery in many cases, and drive failure prevention in many others, but the best approach is to buy it and use it as a preventative measure before disaster strikes, rather than a last ditch effort on a failed one.

There is also the fact that Gibson has been slow in releasing an update to Spinrite, which has remained stagnant at versions 6 for over 10 years. He keeps working on other projects and promising to get back to version 6.1, but it's a long time coming. There is a known issue with 6 that can affect large modern drives and some motherboard BIOS implementations. This happened to me on the very first drive I on which I tried to run the refresh/maintenance mode. It ran for a few hours, then spit out a Divide by Zero error message. When I looked into it, I learned of this deficiency on some systems. It would have been nice to know about this before I spending my $, but I guess that's not good advertising. Supposedly, this will be addressed in the next version, whenever that happens...