Toshiba Canvio 3.0 500GB running extremely slow

[vescopaskalev]

I had Toshiba Canvio 3.0 500GB for nearly a year, and it become REALLY slow over time. It may take it hours to transfer a couple of gigabytes. I thought it might be because overloaded or fragmented, so i formatted it. Now it is freshly formated (NTFS, MBR) but still extremely slow both Read and Write. Surprisingly it is very fast on a Mac (read only of course) so apparently it is not a hardware problem. Any ideas what may be wrong. (I have a PC with Windows 7 enterprise, on Intel i5 @3GHz)

 

[Xibyth]

Your plugging it into a USB 3.0 slot on windows right, other than that it is probably power saving features in windows.

 

[vescopaskalev]

yes, device manager says its USB 3, though I am not sure if the slot itself looks any different. But the slot and the PC are not the problem, because I have another Toshiba 500GB disk, which works just fine.

 

[Xibyth]

Windows based malware then, run a scan of the external, it wouldn't affect the Mac so it would explain the normal speed on that machine and the other isn't infected, so it would run normally too. Otherwise its likely a bug.

 

[vescopaskalev]

thank you, makes sense and will try, but what kind of malware can survive formatting?

 

[Xibyth]

thank you, makes sense and will try, but what kind of malware can survive formatting?

A specific part of the hard drive thats used for record keeping, every drive has them and some forms of malware attack this specific region and formatting doesn't take it out. More commonly these are know as Boot Sector Viruses and though not every drive has a boot sector this kind of virus doesn't actually attach itself to the boot sector. The best way to remove it is to run diskpart from the command promt, select the infected disk, and run the clean all command. You would then need to Re-Initialize the disk from Disk Management, create a new volume, and format it. A quick google search on each of these topics and guide you through it and explain it in more detail. Bear in mind, the clean all command will take quite some time on a 500GB usb drive, likely more than a few hours, and it will not tell you how far along it is just trust it's doing its job and dont try to stop it once you have started it.