External WD drive slows down extremely almost hangs as the transfer progresses..

[Jm11]

I have a WD passport 500GB external drive with 300GB free space and no fragmentation.

I was trying to copy/paste my ~60 GB data from my old laptop into this drive using a usb 3.0 connection. It begins with 2-3Mb/s but slows down to less than 100Kb/s only after 2-3GB have been transferred. The result is that after more than 12 hours only 3-5 GB have been transferred. The copy pop-up still shows files being copied very slowly like a few files every minute out of 100s of thousands of files.

I have checked the disk drives->policies and it's checked for "optimize for performance". The "write caching" option is grayed out. I also stopped the Background Intelligent Services on the laptop. The laptop OS is Vista.

I really have no idea why this is happening. I had copied the same data about 2 months ago to a different folder in this external drive in about 12-18 hours, even though the final results had showed a difference of ~1GB in the source and destination folder with destination not getting 1GB less.

But now the data transfer is almost hung every time I try to do it. How should this be fixed?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Jm11,

It may be a good idea to back up the most important data stored on the drive until you sort this out.
After that, you can just check the drive's health out with WD's DLG tool. It would be nice if you run both short and extended tests: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=xMUQHF
You can test your internal drive with some of these as well: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Also, it may be a good idea to run disk check on both: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/check-your-hard-disk-for-errors

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD