17 year old hard drive data recovery
Hello! I am using a phone to write this, so sorry for any formatting issues.
I have recently been having issues with my st31000520as and want to recover it's data. I got it as a hand down from my step dad when I was a teen and built my first custom build desktop. I did not realize at the time how old the drive was... At this time, it is now a 17 year old hard drive disk.
Since I mostly used the drive for old images and videos of gameplay, along with some git stuff, I did not pay much attention to it. It always made a whirring sound whenever the computer turned on, and I assumed it was normal. A month ago, however, I looked at some system data apps while overclocking and undervolting for the first time, and I saw that my hard drive had been giving me almost 200 read/write head errors constantly. I looked up those errors and saw it could mean a failing drive. I have since gotten an SSD and moved all the data I could see on the drive into that SSD. It seems that I found out just in time, as the drive has started acting up fully now.
However, there is some data which I cannot see on the drive. The drive says it has filled space, but it did not show anything in explorer, even in hidden files. The drive has also started to restart itself and make the whirring sound, which you can see in task manager when the drive disappears for a few seconds, and it freezes file explorer whenever it does so.
I have been looking at data recovery software, but many of them seem to have a limit of how much data you can save. This drive seems to have 1.5TB of data that might be recoverable. (Also, I found out it had corrupted windows system files, so it was a reason I, in the past, had to reinstall windows due to issues with the system.) Now that it is giving "Device is not ready" errors whenever I even try to look at the drive, I want to quickly save the data before the drive fails completely... I have set it to read only mode in CMD so it cannot write anything to try protecting all I can.
It is honestly a miracle it survived this long, and I don't want to take that miracle for granted. How would I go about saving all 1.5TB of this drive's data? There is some old photos and videos in it that I really want to save.