'Broken' hard drive and repairing it

[HiMyNameIsStan]

Hi everyone

So  a while back I accidentally spilled almost an entire glass of water on the keyboard of my old laptop. I removed my hard drive short thereafter in the hopes that the files would still be intact. My music was as far as I could see intact, however, all pictures(including album covers for the songs) were heavily distorted. So I deleted all pictures.

This was about 1 1/2 years ago. I now have a new laptop but still have the hard drive(HDD drive).

The reason I'm bringing this up now is because my current laptop has an SSD of 256 GB and I'm lacking space to store all my files so  I was wondering if I can repair the drive and use it as an external hard drive. I have it plugged in now and although it functions reasonably well, saving files is really unreliable. Sometimes it saves them correctly and sometimes they're saved distorted and sometimes they seem to be okay first but then get distorted a while later.

My question is if there's any way to restore the hard drive or if it's just physically broken. Windows wants to repair the drive but gives me an error and tells me to try again later. 

Is there a way to properly repair the hard drive reliably, so I can use it as a backup and save files on it without any risk of getting corrupted?

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Stop messing with it. The drive is damaged and cannot be repaired and the more you try to read data from it and write to it the more corrupted it will get. One last time, hook the drive up and try to copy what you want to keep. The integrity of the copies will never be better than now. 

[HiMyNameIsStan]

Thanks for your reply

I'm not trying to recover any files at the moment, I just wanted to know if I could use it as a backup drive but apparently that isn't the case, which is a shame because hard drives are pretty expensive

Guess I have no choice though, thanks a bunch!

[Huffer]

Hard to complain about $50 for 1 TB of storage:

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Mobile-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B071F9MLJJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529078260&s...

[HiMyNameIsStan]

I think that's still expensive, but maybe because I'm Dutch and a college student that wants to save all the money he has 😛

Anyways I'm in luck, my brother happens to have swapped his HDD for an SSD so I can use that 

Again, thanks a bunch!

[Huffer]

Indeed you are in luck.