Ok, so I tried the deep freeze trick. But as you can guess it didn't work. So I guess that's the end of the road for that one.
But I would like to ask if any of you have recommendations on another external hard drive? The one that died was a western digital 500 gig, so needless to say I don't think I'd but another one of those. Maybe it was just one bad apple in the basket so I'm open to ideas and opinions.