Question Read speed rapidly drops after a few seconds

[andrzej.mendel-nykorowycz]

Hi all,

I am trying to recover data from WD Green 2 TB HDD (WD20EARS-00MVWB0) taken out of a failed WD MyBookLive, but I am encountering a weird problem with the drive. I am curious if any of you have encountered anything similar.

While cloning it with ddrescue, it starts at reasonable read speed of ~10-20 MB/s before rapidly dropping to below 100 KB/s and staying at this level. Restarting ddrescue brings the speed back to 10-20 MB/s before again slowing down below 100 KB/s. There are some read errors in the logs, but they do not correlate with slowdows.

I am doing the cloning with GNU ddrescue, tried it on both my laptop (running Ubuntu) and on RaspberryPi. The drive being cloned is in an external SATA-to-USB enclosure, I am cloning it to a WD Elemental drive connected by USB. This is a block level operation, so filesystem should not be an issue here. The drive was flaky while in WD MyBookLive (yes, I should have backed it up and decommisioned it way earlier) but nothing like this.

Any advice welcome.

Best,
Andrzej

 

[USAFRet]

I'm thinking this is just a failing drive.

Let it run. There is no magic to make it faster.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm thinking this is just a failing drive.

Let it run. There is no magic to make it faster.