Slow External Hard Disk

deadp00l

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Feb 26, 2015
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4,510
My 1 TB external hard disk is making my life miserable.

Its runs painfully slow when I want to copy files into it, The data in it is still accessible and fine but it comes to a crawl during file transfer.

I tried some things like, setting it for performance, checking it for errors, run a diagnostics using WinDFT, nothing seems to work.:pfff:
 
Hey deadp00l (awesome hero by the way... waiting for the movie :D).
Now for the serious part. So you didn't get any SMART status errors or anything? Have you made an extended test to see if the drive has any bad sectors?
I'd recommend that you backup your data ASAP, just to be on the safe side. Then try the drive with a different computer and a different USB cable (not longer than 12"). You should also try it with different USB ports 2.0 as well as 3.0 to see if the same thing happens again. What OS are you using?

Hope that helps. Let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD
 

lordgeoff6009

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Apr 4, 2015
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4,510



....and how long do you think it will take to backup about 1TB of data from the WD to my C: at the rate of 150KB/Second..............

 
Is the drive removable? I would test the drive directly on a SATA port on a motherboard and see if it's the enclosure or the drive. Depending on the model it may have a custom connector not a regular SATA. I learned the hard way to make sure that any external drive I get is just a regular SATA drive with a USB connection, not one with a custom board and connectors.

I have seen quite a few very slow external drives.