So…a few months back my ext Drive Suddenly stopped showing up on my PC. I tried 3 recovery softwares, reset ports…everything to get my laptop to recognize. Days later, I gave up and was really devastated to lose over 10 years worth of hardcore comic and ebook collections, among uhh …other media 
. Today, when I noticed another ext Drive wasn’t showing up, I accidentally plugged in the “dead” WD drive, and was shocked to see it show up again!
Here’s the problem…
I’ve been transferring as much data to other drivers as possible, but about every 30 minutes, the drive overheats and slows to a crawl and about 10 mins later, stops. The drive is very hot. I pause the transfer, unplug the drive and let it cool for an hour, and start again. This drive is 5TB, so at this rate, I’m going to be doing this, probably until my deathbed. I’ve got the drive sitting on a sealed tight bag of ice right now, and that’s prevented overheating by an extra half hour. I’m also thinking that enough of this and the drive will surely fry before I can get the data transfered. Any advise? Please don’t worry about telling me about the importance of backups…I know, and was actually saving for one when this happened. I need ideas like…should I run WinZip and transfer the data in compressed chunks? Also, is there some way to manually make the drive transfer data slower and therefore lower the heat? Right now, it’s going at around 30mbps. I’d be fine with 5. I know u can do this with Linux command shell by making the drive stop every so many minutes and then resume after a specified time period. I’m also wondering if the sealed ice pack on the outside might create condensation in the drive and damage data? I’m open to anything, I’ll purchase any software if you know from experience that would help. Pls help, you’ll be doing your good deed of the week. I would be sending this off to a professional service but I have a collection of wikileaks, email server, and other leaked documents on there, and I’d rather not trust my name being attached to materials going to a company whose policies I’m not familiar with. Thanks for reading.
