My external hard drive just died

The price tag is irrelevant at this point. What matters is that this drive held years of irreplaceable backups from several different computers—data I’ve been meticulously accumulating for ages. Is there any way to recover this information, and if so, what kind of expense am I looking at? Honestly, I would have much preferred a motherboard failure over a dead hard drive... please, I'm desperate for some guidance. 😢

It’s been years... haven't you thought about just controlling the damage and swapping in a new drive?

You could try plugging it directly into your PC. Maybe it'll wake up? Who knows, maybe the enclosure's electronics just died. Worth a shot, right?

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&expIds=1...5b77dccdfb6052
Such an expensive headache... :/