Is this disk dead?

[David Morrison]

A friend bought a WD Elements 2TB external portable disk, ie, USB powered. It 
worked ok for a day or two, then she could not get some files off it. She asked 
me to help.

When I first plugged it in, it would mount. However, trying to copy files off 
it would start, and sometimes copy some files. Often, though, it would start 
copying then there would be a click from the drive, and it would just sit 
there, no error message, but not copying either. The disk was still spinning, 
as the vibration could be felt.

So I started copying it using ddrescue to see if it could be recovered.

bash-3.2# date ; ddrescue -n -f -s 2001GiB /dev/rdisk1 /dev/rdisk2 Jenni.log ; 
date

After nearly two days, it is reporting this:

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
     ipos:    4938 MB, non-trimmed: 4939 MB,  current rate:       0 B/s
     opos:    4938 MB, non-scraped:        0 B,  average rate:       0 B/s
non-tried:    1995 GB, bad-sector:        0 B,    error rate:   32768 B/s
  rescued:        0 B,   bad areas:        0,        run time:  1d 17h 59m
pct rescued:    0.00%, read errors: 75369,  remaining time:         n/a
                              time since last successful read:         n/a
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 5 (forwards)

The fact that it is on pass 5 and has still not rescued anything at all makes 
me think that the fault is not on the disk surface, but somewhere in the 
electronics. If so, then I suspect I am unlikely to get anything off it.

The way it is going, it looks like it will take several weeks to finish. If 
this is going to be fruitless, I might as well stop now.

Does this analysis sound reasonable? Is there any chance of recovering anything?

This is ddrescue 1.23.

Cheers

David