External hard drive failing! Urgent! Please help!

My WD ELEMENTS 1.5tb hard drive is taking a turn for the worse.

Out of nowhere the other day, it took about 3 minutes for it to mount on my desktop. When I would try and pull a file off of it...it would take forever (i.e. 75gb took over 8 hours)

First tried, Disk Utility and it would say one of two things. Either it could not repair the disk due to a "Unmounting Error" or it would take 90 mins and finally say that the drive is fine.

Tried it on other computers...no dice...same issue.

Next, I tried taking it out and placing it into a new enclosure. That did not help.

Then I tried to use Data Rescue 3 to clone the drive to get the files off of there...but that said it would take 5-6000 hours to clone. That is like 2 months!!!

Tried tech support and they told me to reformat the drive. This is NOT an option due to the fact that there are important files on the drive that have not been backed up yet and they are for a current job. If I can't get this going...I could lose the job.

I don't know what else to do!! Is there some magical code in Terminal that will save my files or get them off of there faster so I can meet my deadline in 5 days?!

What is going on?!?! HELP PLEASE!!!

Currently running:

Macbook Pro
10.6.7
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4gb 1067 MHz DDR3

The Drive:

Western Digital Elements
1.5tb
Format : Mac Extended Journaled