that disk did not die the clicking death

When I put a FRITZ!Box 7390 in place here more than 2 years ago, one of the features I discovered with big joy and that I started to make use of, was that it powers down USB attached ATA disks after a user defined period of inactivity. You can also have a USB hub in between, and I started making use of that as well.

The ATA disk (#1) I attached, is actually a notebook disk with its own external housing. It got formatted with ext2, because I prefer that over the DOS file system.

In the beginning of 2012 that disk (#1) was no longer accessible. First I was sure, that it had died the clicking death. But when I attempted to replace it with another one (#2),
it turned out, the source of irritation was actually the USB hub, because after eliminating the USB hub and attaching disk #2 directly to the FRITZ!Box disk #2 was "perfectly" accessible again.

So I gave disk #1 another try, mounted it somewhere else, and that worked without problem.

I thought, I should note this somewhere, because it might occur to others as well.

Of course, why should live USB hubs live for ever? But I was rather, rather astonished to understand this scenario.

Well, it's not absolutely unlikely, that disk #1 will die for ever after being in use in another environment for another while. That's a behavior I found documented elsewhere.

No, the housing (external case) wasn't the reason for the problem, at least it worked with other disks.