I've had a Western Digital Elements 2TB external hard drive for about 3 years now. It's served me well, and is a nice place to back up my music collection and some videos I've made. There's only about 120GB left on the drive.
Lately I've been experiencing horrendous slowdown on the drive. About 90% of the time, when I go into any folder on the drive, be it Root, a folder with 2 items in it, or a folder with 200, the green "loading bar" crawls across the top of my Windows Explorer screen (I use Windows 7 64-bit) at an extremely slow pace, and I can't access anything during this phase. Once the folder loads, if I try to click into a subfolder, I have to wait for the loading bar AGAIN. If I try to play a video, the video will stall, often as bad as once every 5 seconds, pausing for about 10 seconds every time. Going up a level means yet another long load time. Copying or deleting files to/from the device takes many times longer than it ought to. As far as I can tell, nothing else is reading or writing to the drive as this happens.
Clearly, something is wrong with my drive's ability to read itself.
I've been googling, and at first I thought it might have had something to do with indexing, so I right-clicked the drive and started to deny indexing permissions for the drive and all its subfolders. As it applied these settings, the first few folders flew by, processing dozens of files per second, but about a fifth of the way into my music backup folder, it started taking about 20 seconds per file, just to change that one setting. I'm running the chkdsk utility on it right now, and it's processing files, but it's only doing 1 every 10 seconds or so.
Previously, the drive has behaved like this: the first time I tried looking at a folder on the drive each day, I'd have to wait a few seconds for the drive to "spin up", so to speak, and be ready to use. After that, I could go in and out of folders freely, until I left the drive alone for an hour or so, then the next time I wanted to use it I'd have to wait a few seconds again for that first folder. This always struck me as some type of "power saver" option
It's clearly a drive-specific problem. Nothing else on my PC seems to be doing this. Could it be the cable? Could anyone recommend a diagnostic tool?
I have an i5 2500k and 16GB of RAM, if that helps.
Lately I've been experiencing horrendous slowdown on the drive. About 90% of the time, when I go into any folder on the drive, be it Root, a folder with 2 items in it, or a folder with 200, the green "loading bar" crawls across the top of my Windows Explorer screen (I use Windows 7 64-bit) at an extremely slow pace, and I can't access anything during this phase. Once the folder loads, if I try to click into a subfolder, I have to wait for the loading bar AGAIN. If I try to play a video, the video will stall, often as bad as once every 5 seconds, pausing for about 10 seconds every time. Going up a level means yet another long load time. Copying or deleting files to/from the device takes many times longer than it ought to. As far as I can tell, nothing else is reading or writing to the drive as this happens.
Clearly, something is wrong with my drive's ability to read itself.
I've been googling, and at first I thought it might have had something to do with indexing, so I right-clicked the drive and started to deny indexing permissions for the drive and all its subfolders. As it applied these settings, the first few folders flew by, processing dozens of files per second, but about a fifth of the way into my music backup folder, it started taking about 20 seconds per file, just to change that one setting. I'm running the chkdsk utility on it right now, and it's processing files, but it's only doing 1 every 10 seconds or so.
Previously, the drive has behaved like this: the first time I tried looking at a folder on the drive each day, I'd have to wait a few seconds for the drive to "spin up", so to speak, and be ready to use. After that, I could go in and out of folders freely, until I left the drive alone for an hour or so, then the next time I wanted to use it I'd have to wait a few seconds again for that first folder. This always struck me as some type of "power saver" option
It's clearly a drive-specific problem. Nothing else on my PC seems to be doing this. Could it be the cable? Could anyone recommend a diagnostic tool?
I have an i5 2500k and 16GB of RAM, if that helps.
