External Hard Disk speed decreased overnight.

[AnalDelRey]

Just like it states in the title, my four year old 1TB WD elements external hard drive's (usb 2.0) speed just dropped overnight.
It was working perfectly fine last night when I transferred a couple of files but ever since today morning, it has become virtually unusable.

The transfer speeds are in kbps.
It takes a very long time for the PC to detect the drive and opening a folder inside it can take ages.

I ran Auslogics Disk Defrag tool to see if a Defrag would solve the issue but after 11 hours, it's only at 7%.

I checked the S.M.A.R.T details and it says the health is bad.
Everything except for Reallocated Sector Count is normal.
The value, worse, threshold and raw data values of this field are as follows:
133,133,140,561

Which I think looks pretty bad.

I don't care much for the hard drive itself, it has run its course and served me well. It's the data inside it that is important.
Due to the very slow transfer speed, I can't copy the data to a different hard drive.

Is there anyway to temporarily fix this issue?
Are there any tools available that will help me make a backup WITH THE ORIGINAL SPEEDS?
I just need to get my files out of the hard drive safely before it dies forever.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there,

Sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive.
It seems that there are some bad sectors on the drive and they prevent you from copying at normal speed.

One thing you can try, is to boot up Ubuntu from a flash drive(or a CD, external, etc.) and see if you will get better transfer speed. Ubuntu sometimes handles drives with bad sectors better. Here's a thread on that: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode

In case this does not work, you can try using some data recovery tool: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope this will help. Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[AnalDelRey]

I'll try opening it on Ubuntu.

Will the data recovery option work in my case though? Wouldn't I get the same slow speeds if I attempted a data recovery or backup?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Well, it will not hurt to try.
My suggestion would be to try the Ubuntu Live CD approach first.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD