I found myself agreeing with much of this article, but I have to say, I used SpinRite to great effect maybe 20 years ago on a drive that had the “click of death”.

I tried all kinds of methods of recovery, and nothing worked until I tried SpinRite. I can’t speak to how it did what it did (who knows, maybe it was a total fluke), but it gave me the opportunity to scrape all of my data off of it before buying a replacement drive.