My Book Elite 500gb & My Passport 500gb issues!

Hi, thought i would try here after seeing other threads seem to relate to a lot of unreliability of WD HDD’s and just want to know if my issue with My Book Elite hard drive is recoverable or not?

Just for note both HDD drives i have started coincidentally having issues when i changed over from a Vista O/S to a new laptop with Win7 O/S.

I have had the My Book for approx three years, but hardly used it until recently and had from memory around 160gb of data (photos, music & docs) and recently started to use it a bit more regularly with my PS3 as well as my laptop but it started to falter by not showing up and other times would, but eventually and in tandem with it starting to make a clicking or shall i say clunking sound is coming from the drive when plugged into laptop and is not recognized at all even though the drivers installed okay on my new  HP Envy Win7 O/S and am now wandering with a great deal of hesitation if this can be recovered at all as the clunking sound is a tad ominous. I have tried another usb cable as someone else did on here but still zip : (

With the My Passport Elite 500gb (previous model without the smartware ■■■■) coincidentally same time as the MY Book started having problems when i plugged into  the Win7 laptop it came up with i had bad sectors that needed fixing, but not having backups of this drive i cancelled doing anything i may of regretted, but noticed then that loading folders took an age (approx 200gb used) and some folders would not load up and it went into “Not responding” mode like Windows can do and certain folders where not access able because of this, but decided to run the scan for bad sectors as it would remind me everytime i plugged in and doing so where it has fixed what bad sectors it thought there was i am now missing some folders with photos that opened okay and it seemed to delete around 30gb of data which i cannot get back now.

If anyone could shed light on either of this issues i would gratefull as i am not to clued up with the tech side on HDD’s and naively thought WD would be a safe back-up for all my data but seems i am not alone in been let down by a company that accaims to be one of the leaders in it’s field. 

All i wanted was a HDD that would be safe as houses to back up my data and not worry about file corruption/hardware issues but seems this was to much to ask perhaps?

But as some more wiser egg’s have stated on here, you do not have a back up unless you have made a back-up of the back-up of the back-up! 

Shame on you WD for poor products and hope someone can help with those Q’s. 

Am i likely to get a WD product again, hmmm…?