A.R.S.E.

So...

Turns out I am a victim of the Seagate 3TB hard drive clusterfuck. It's a two-year-old Seagate ST3000DM001 that suddenly stopped working when I was transferring some files to it on my personal PC. Now it makes the dreaded chirping / clicking sound. The drive sounds like it spins up fine, so I would be assuming it's some sort of head issue.

Google tells me that this model of drive is renowned for failing at about this age...even being subject of a lawsuit. It would have been helpful to discover that earlier.

I have partial backups of most of the content on there, but I'd still like to recover as much as possible.

So does anyone have recommendations on data recovery companies / potential solutions?

Sorry to hear VT & I don't have any recommendations.

Morale of the story is don't buy Seagate HDD's, I haven't for a long time now after they started having these issues. Not that you want to hear that now

I'm very sorry to hear that, too. I recommend asking this question on OCAU, there are a few nice and knowledgeable people over there.
Be prepared it'll be expensive if you go for a data recovery company. As in fcuking expensive for a proper recovery. But I think I've read about someone temp-hacking their drive with another's circuit board or something, and got it to work enough to recover their data.

The moral of the story isn't just avoiding seagate, in my opinion, but more a full & proper (and regular!) backups of everything that you are afraid of losing. And maybe redundancy (eg raid 1).

I know it does not help, but nearly all of us have been there, lucky you have at least some backup!