Seagate (Samsung) external drive USB 3.0 not mounting on High Sierra

Please redirect if i've missed a similar thread: Seagate 500GB USB 3.0 working fine last week, now won't mount. OS is High Sierra 10.13.6.

I have tried a restart and a recovery mode restart, no results.

The drive is visible in Disk Utility but hitting 'Mount' does nothing. First Aid was originally failing instantly, in further attempts it seemed to do get half the job done before failing. I got the following error message:

Any suggestions? Failing that, any recommendations on data recovery options (assuming that's even an option)

Solution 1:

Looks like hardware failure to me. It might not be the drive itself. Could be a bad connection, or bad power supply. You haven't given any specific details on how you have this drive hooked up to your computer. Nor whether it's a 2.5, or 3.5" drive. So a definitive answer isn't possible. It it's read/write, tracks/sectors failing, smartmon will indicate to your BIOS/OS that the drive is failing, and needs to be replaced. You should perform a fresh boot and immediately look at your logs to see whether smartmon is reporting failures. But do check all your connections before powering up the computer && hard drive.

Good luck!