it’s not working and it smells faintly of burning. Is there a way of getting all the stored stuff off it..?

Probbly not.

Or maybe.

Pends what’s ‘burning’. Power supply bit?

Can you hear any noises coming from it? Clicking or whirring?

If it’s a failed power supply then you might be able to take the HD out of the case and bung it in a PC.

you could try the drive in an external caddy (assuming it’s the interface thats toasted)

Yeah.

An ‘external’ drive is a regular internal drive in a posh box. It’s almost certainly the posh box that’s buggered. Take the drive out of the caddy, fit it as a regular drive (or in another caddy).

If you need to “get the data off it” then the moral of this story is, take backups. Storage is cheap, data can be priceless.

This is true. I had 2 drives fail over one weekend. Fortunately I had two other drives with all data backed up….

Thanks for the advice chaps. Being a little technologically backward it hadn’t occurred to me that inside the box it was just a regular HD. It does seem to be the case/power bit that smells burnt.

sorry to hijack but I have a Freecom hard drive which is broken – the connection keeps dropping. I use it for backup but it doesn’t stay connected for long enough to fully backup.
This one

Is it easy for a computer hardware newbie to get the hard drive out of the case and into a new one? I can’t find any screws in order to get inside it…

If it’s anything like mine it involved using a screwdriver to prise the case which them slides apart. There are screws inside the case that then need unscrewing.

What you need is an air-cooled manually operated percussive maintenance tool.

In seriousness, I’m not familiar with that specific drive. However, I’m confident that it’ll be a normal HDD inside and the case will be held together with FAC(*) fasteners or glue. Assuming that the case is sacrificial, then if the former I’d suggest a combination of a flatblade screwdriver and a splash of ‘brute force and ignorance’, if the latter, well, see the above image. (-:

(* – Really Annoying Clips)