Since this seems related so I’ll share a tip that has saved my datas bacon on several occasions.
If you’ve ever had a drive that was no longer recognized by the computer but still spins up it’s probably due to a problem with the PCB. For example I accidentally plugged the wrong power supply into a drive and fried the PCB. This was very bad because it had all my current projects on it one of which I had just delivered to a client. It would have cost me thousands to send it to a recovery place but instead I bought another drive with the same model number and swapped the PCB and recovered my files.
A friend of mine was using a drive he got out of the trash and it eventually died on him. He sent me the drive and I managed to find a drive on ebay with the matching model number and did the same thing and recovered his files.
So besides not using drives you found in the trash the lesson here is to do frequent backups and clearly label your power supplies.