Not quite the same, but I made the mistake of using my RPi to run my home server and NAS off of an external USB non-NAS (i.e., not intended to be running 24/7) drive...with no backup or redundancy. The drive actually lasted a good long while, but it did die, and very suddenly, a couple of months ago. And now I've lost all my stuff that was on it. Still holding out hope I can figure out a way to recover the drive, but yeah.
Sorry I'm not sure what you mean. Yes it's an HDD. A USB plug-in one in a non-user-serviceable enclosure. I can't (without completely destroying it) get the HDD itself out. And I'm not sure what it would even mean to put it into a working HDD. The broken HDD itself is the problem, I think.
I can't recall the exact model, but it's some form of Seagate Expansion Desktop, sort of like the ones shown here. Mine was 1.5 TB, IIRC.
Thanks for that link. Wish there was a bot to translate links back into normal YouTube videos like there's one to send you off to that other site, but it's easy enough to manually change the URL I suppose. Anyway, doing that is way beyond my skills, and I'm not sure the data would be worth paying a professional to do that either. I can't imagine that comes cheap.