Three Photographer HDDs Ejected and Started Clunking in One Enclosure: What Should You Do Next?

kiki updated Sep 30, 26

5 min(s)

TL;DR:

Immediately stop using the shared dual-bay enclosure that caused the three 6TB IronWolf Pro drives to eject, and keep the clunking drive powered off to prevent permanent physical hardware damage.
    ● Large RAW folder deletions in Mac Finder do not trigger mechanical failures, indicating the enclosure or its power path is the likely electrical fault and must not be reused with your remaining 30TB of backups.
    ● Send the clunking or persistently undetected drives to a professional recovery lab if the missing files are irreplaceable, as running repeated dock tests will worsen the hardware condition and complicate data extraction.
    ● Recoverit Hard Drive Recovery is limited to logical data loss and should only be utilized if a non-clunking drive becomes stably readable through a completely different, known-good connection.

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Deleting several terabytes of files in Finder is not, by itself, a diagnosis for three hard-drive failures. The important clue is that multiple drives ejected or became inaccessible while connected through the same enclosure, and one began making an abnormal clunking sound. Stop using that enclosure and do not repeatedly power the clunking drive while trying different software.

In this wedding-photographer recovery case on Reddit, three 6TB IronWolf Pro drives were being cleaned up on a Mac through the same dual-bay enclosure. Two drives ejected during one large RAW-folder deletion, one then clunked and stopped connecting, and a third drive later failed in a similar way when used alone in the same enclosure. The delivered JPEGs were backed up online, but older RAWs and some personal/freelance files were not.

Dragging Files To Trash Is A Normal Mac Operation

Apple's Mac file-deletion guidance explicitly uses dragging items to Trash and emptying Trash as the normal deletion workflow. A very large deletion can keep the drive busy, but the act of deleting files does not by itself explain why several healthy drives would begin ejecting or making abnormal mechanical-sounding noises.

The Shared Enclosure Or Power Path Is A Suspect, Not A Proven Diagnosis

Because the failures repeated across different drives while the same enclosure remained in the chain, the enclosure, its power supply, cabling, or connection path deserves suspicion. But the Reddit symptoms cannot prove a specific electrical fault, and a drive that was already marginal could also fail under sustained activity. Do not reuse the enclosure with the remaining 30TB of backups until it has been replaced or independently tested away from irreplaceable data.

For the drive that started clunking, treat the noise as a hardware warning rather than a software problem. Seagate notes that hard clicking can indicate physical failure, and its noisy-drive guidance recommends powering down a drive that develops excessive grinding or clanking because continued use can make later recovery harder.

Where Recoverit Fits

Recoverit Hard Drive Recovery is appropriate for logical data loss when the hard drive is readable and stable enough for the operating system to access. It is not the first step for the clunking or persistently undetected drives in this case. If a non-clunking drive becomes consistently readable through a known-good connection, recover or image it to a different healthy drive before doing anything destructive.