External Hard Drive Slower Than It Used To Be?

Question

Western Digital replaced my old defective hard drive, this new drive worked well for like a week and then started being slow. (i mean "slowwwwww")

I format the drive and benchmarked it, the drive is reading at 500kb/s to 2Mb/s and around 890ms access time. but when it was new it read at 28-30Mb/s. It behaves this way on more than one machine and all other programs are closed during the benchmark

I tried to copy files to it now that it's format, and it took ages!!! just to transfer a 200Mb file it took like 10 minutes. This used to take maybe 1 minute.

I keep having this issue with Western Digital drives, is this a common problem with them? or just my luck?

What would cause a hard drive to do this? It still holds the data, there is no clicking hard drive failing sounds, it still reads and writes but it does it at such slow speeds it feels like I'm writing to a floppy drive.

Being how the drive was fast at first and became slow, it shouldn't matter but It's USB 2.0, I tried it with and without write cache on the drive with the same results, this is Windows 7 but the drive access is also slow in Ubuntu on my other USB 2.0 machine.

I think I can RMA it back to the factory as it's under warranty but I just want to know what causes this, if anyone has similar experience or could recommend an external USB drive that doesn't do this.

Thanks for all your answers

Answer 1

i can't tell you to format you HDD cause you will loose everything it have but you can try scan it for errors , also make sure the problem is not your computer , like you said your HDD is external , try to clean your pc cache , you can use track eraser pro , or evidence eliminator or advanced system care , google these program, or go to download.com you will find it there

Answer 2

The first thing to do to speed up pc and get rid of malwares and viruses is cleaning the registry with a program like CCLeaner http://bitly.com/UrARzC

Give it a try.

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

See if there is a firmware update availible for the drive. It may also be the controller chip in the enclosure that is slowing things down. Also see if a different cable helps at all.

Answer 4

that is an concept to close all different domicile windows which you do no longer choose. i be responsive to that could be a discomfort in case you go with facebook on an identical time as you pass documents yet your processor ought to apply this unfastened time to pass. in case you're used to employing USB 2.0(480Mb/s) or perhaps 3.0(5Gb/s) those pass speeds are a lot bigger than USB a million.0/a million.a million (a million.5Mb/s). and you ought to undergo in techniques that shifting movies will take in distinctive time as they're great data.

Answer 5

Defrag it. Clean it, FORMAT IT!