Ultra Slow SATA drive - but not dead

[Briant]

I have this 1TB WD green drive in an external USB 2.0/eSATA enclosure w/fan cooling (Antec) . Drive has been working fine for a few months until the last week. I can save data to it at normal speed but reading data off is so slow I thought it was toast. The transfer speed for a read is actually 5Kbytes/second. Yes 5 K bytes like an ancient modem you might have laying around. It performs the same in another enclosure and even on a SATA port, so its not the enclosure.

The drive is about half full so I'm still in the painful process of moving all the data off. I guess 5k/s is better than 0. ;)

Anyone seen this behavior before? Must be some fallback safe mode. I'll check it with a tool after I get the data off, maybe it can be fixed.

[dandragonrage]

haha, I had a 40GB drive do that once. It took like 10 minutes to boot Windows.

I threw it out.

[extide]

It's probably the external enclosure...

[Old Hippie]

It's probably the external enclosure...

It performs the same in another enclosure and even on a SATA port, so its not the enclosure.



Sounds like it could be in PIO mode and that's usually a bad sign for the drive or cable.

If I were you, I'd be getting the data off that drive and run the WD Tools (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Western-Digital-Data-Lifeguard-Tools.shtml).