My OS is on a 512gb M.2 drive, but the main storage on my laptop was a 1TB HDD, it started making noise about 2 weeks ago so I backed everything up onto a 1TB SanDisk USB SSD. This afternoon it got very clicky when I booted it up after work and icons for a few games I had stored on it, like KSP and YUZU, disappeared from the desktop and taskbar.
Some of your data may have still been borked BTW
It's best practice to maintain a backup
I'm better at it than I used to be but unfortunately I lost a lot of data to learn that lesson
My drive started ticking a long time ago, I thought I successfully saved my data but when I dug through the drive a bunch of directories were full of broken files