This is from dictation.
From what you have said, you certainly have reason for concern. The important issue has to do with the age of the hard drive. A few tetra byte Hargraves made a few years ago had a lot of trouble. And it was not just Western digital. If the drive was relatively new the problem could be just a quirk or, abnormality in the manufacture of the drive. Otherwise, the drive has a problem that cannot be fixed if it was one of the earlier drives that had premature failure. It was a very serious manufacturing technique that cannot be easily repaired outside of the factory.
Sorry for the pessimistic note. If you can get your backup drives off of the drive, consider yourself lucky. It is very unusual for a drive their to cause a complete loss of connectivity.
One might suspect that there is some problem other than just the hard disk drive itself. That is to say not just the hard drive disk itself, but also the electronics and power supply that go with it. The drive may have a defective power supply in which case it's not cost effective to try to repair it.
This is not intended as a criticism of Western Digital. products are top notch most the time. But failures to occur in this industry and sometimes there's no way to know ahead of time when it's going to happen.
In addition to using an external hard drive, you might consider also using a cloud service However, cloud storage can be rather pricey if you have a lot of data to store. If you have all the original media used for your programs and your operating system, there is no need to save everything. In case of a failure you could just do a reinstallation of everything.
The most important data to save is the personal stuff you have created yourself. Such would be documents, photos and videos and any music that you have created yourself. Usually this kind of material does not take up a lot of space, with the exception of video files. But video files, in my opinion, should be burned to DVDs where they can be kept as long as you like.
If you check the current prices for external backup drives you'll see that the prices have come down somewhat and that the effort needed to try and repair the defective drive far outweighs the cost of just buying a new one.
That is about all I have to say. Hope you are able to get your data back.