External Hard Drive Suddenly Became Really Slow

[The Asker]

Hi.
1) I have a 931GB Seagate Backup Plus Hard Drive, and a Windows 10 PC.
2) The hard drive was working fine until a couple of days back.
3) Now, the drive takes really long to load after being plugged into the USB Port.
4) Even after that, sometimes when I try to access it, Windows Explorer becomes unresponsive.
5) When I am able to access the drive's contents, and try to transfer files between the PC and the hard drive, it takes exponentially longer for the files to get transferred than before. For instance, I transferred a JPEG image from my PC to the hard drive. It got transferred within 3-4 seconds, when normally it just gets copied instantaneously. When I tried transferring a huge file of around 5GBs, the transfer was still at 0% after 20 minutes. No progress whatsoever. Please tell me what to do. Thanks.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there.

If you have valuable data on that drive which you don't want to lose, go ahead and start backing it up (by starting with the most important things like pictures, photos, documents, etc). Try the drive with a different USB cable and a different computer as well, to see if that helps (hopefully it turns out to be something as simple as a faulty cable).
Once you've backed up everything you need and if the drive is acting up like this even when connected with a different cable and computer, you should download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and run the tests to see what's the situation with the drive.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD