My external hard disk is dead

My external hard disk which I use for backups stopped working. The day before its actual death Windows kept bringing up the usual notification about what to do with a newly connected device. Note that I had this external disk continuously connected to my laptop.

The next day it stopped working entirely. I see a "No media" indication in Disk Management and I also see a message about an "Invalid parameter" when I switch off and on the power supply to it.

The disk is a 1TB size disk in an external enclosure.I'm running Windows 10 pro with the latest updates installed.

Is there anything could try before I consider it as well and truly dead?

I connected the disk to a USB IDE/SATA converter device which I also used in the past with an old orphaned hard disk. Based on past experience the device works. However, nothing happened with the problematic hard disk. In addition, Windows Explorer would identify the external disk in the list of disks that I have connected to the laptop, but would then freeze if I tried to see this disk's properties.

MiniTool Partition Wizard did not list the problematic disk.

I suppose now I have to find a good way to dispose of this disk.

As for backup, I do use a rather elaborate system to backup my laptop data. I actually have four external disks connected to the laptop and I use Macrium Reflect to do backups daily to them. One of these backups is an image backup. I have a scheme doing incremental and differential backups with some redundancy, and I also use @MaxSyncUp to do data backups during the day.

On top of that I use Crashplan for offsite backups and every month or so I backup all data to two other external disks.

I forgot to add that I did consider using Hard Disk Sentinel or Crystal DiskInfo in the past, but when I set up my backup scheme I thought that it may not be so critical, because if I were to lose any one of my backup disks it would not compromise the rest of the backups.

Do not rely on USB IDE/SATA converter. If you had taken the HDD out of its casing , it is best to connect it internally on a desktop and have a check.

If you cannot do it, you may ask your friendly neighbourhood computer shop to do it and have one final check before you decide to throw it away.

Note: If it is a Western Digital external HDD other than Elements model, no need to do the above. All WD external HDDs other than Elements are hardware encrypted and even if the HDD you had taken out proves good, you can only recover the encrypted data which will be rubbish. You can forget data recovery.

Thank you jumanji. I only have a laptop and therefore the only option would have been to take the disk to someone who has a desktop PC. It's not worth the trouble, because even if I do manage to fix it somehow, I would never trust it for backup purposes.

The disk is s actually a Seagate and the data on it is not important to me as I already have a copy elsewhere.

OK, then you have covered yourself well having a second copy. And yes, a backup is not really a backup if one doesn't have it on two different devices.