HDD died - recovery ?

You might. The only similar drives I have are still working, so I'm certainly not going to open them up to do experiments.

CBA - easier to get a new one than risk buggering up tiny cables and PCB tracks.

Swapping out a hard disk doesn't really involve the risk of buggering up tiny cables and PCB tracks. You unplug a SATA data lead and a SATA power lead, plug them into the new drive and the job is done.

Well, then you've got the hassle of copying the data back if you've got a disk-clone image or else of reinstalling the OS, drivers and applications if not. That's the real reason why a new PC is often preferable to changing a hard drive.

I changed the spinning HDD to an SSD in my wife's laptop to speed it up (it made a pretty staggering improvement) and cloning the disk (about 500 GB) using whatever package came with the disk was an overnight job. Mind you, the PC booted up with no hassle afterwards so the cloning obviously worked, unlike my previous experience of it where I spent ages copying from an old HDD to a newer HDD, only to find that the PC would not boot even though another PC could see partitions, filesystem and data on the new drive, so I had to embark on the slow reinstall-from-scratch method.

I cant believe you said that

All of 3 minutes...

You haven't got the old ones have you?

Yes - they are in my workshop somewhere, but I have all the data on my 2TB drive.

OK have now tried Recuva, Easus Data recovery, DMDE all got me nowhere. Disk Drill did at least find a 'not assigned disk' and recovered multiple windows files ... but none of my saved files.

So true. I know from experience. :-(

OK .... never did get any of the data recovered .. tried loads of free programs .... none could recognise the drive.

So have to live with loss of a months data (other than email)

Dent HDD back to WD under warranty ...... they sent me back a new one yesterday ... a 2TB Caviar Black ..... so at least I gained a free 1TB of storage.

Need to reconsider my backup strategy ... manual backup can get forgotten. IN my case had upgraded to W10 and wanted to get all programs re-installed - and put off backup while that was in progress.

It's possible to do RAID-1 on Windows with a little effort. It's only one plank in a complete strategy, of course, but I've had two disk failures in the last few years that were recovered from trivially due to my habit of using RAID-1 on most things.

One still needs backups, and regular ones. I also have off-site backups of important stuff, and encrypted cloud backup using tarsnap.

Just bought one of the below for a friend in the village who believed it when he saw a message saying "This is the Microsoft Windows team - please ring this free number". He said she was very persuasive, so he keyed in what she said so she could remote into the laptop. After fixing the result I suggested an automatic backup. This device can thrown at burglars to kill them and will still work (allegedly). Advantages are that the repeat backup job can also be started immediately by pressing the button on the drive and it's almost the same price as similar unhardened drives.