can a drive fail by going really slow?

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i have a WD drive in an enclosure. tried another drive in its place and all fine. put this 1.5TB WD drive in there and it's soooo slow! 10 mins to copy 50MB onto it! doing a chkdsk now for any errors (which will take eons) but as it's external then SMART info doesn't get sent over.

any ideas folks?
 
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When my WD Black failed, it took almost two weeks to get the data off!

It was strange cause it was really, really slow, and would then have sudden bursts of speed.

I didn't mind too much since I was just pleased that I managed to get my data off it before it failed completely.
 
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i suppose in a way this is better than a sudden total failure. at least we got our data off.

anyhoo, since truecrypting it over night, the speed jumped from KB/sec to 20MB/sec (over usb). weird
 
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Hard Disk Sentinel will pick up SMART data from drives in USB enclosures - I couldn't say if it's always successful, but it's handled every external drive I've personally shown it to date.

The Windows version isn't free, but you could give it a go in trial mode, until you get a chance to install the drive directly in your PC.
 
Soldato
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I found the cause of a very slow computer many years ago was down to a hard drive reading at 4mb/s, drive died before the replacement even arrived, luckily was all backed up!
I have had the same thing happen; a WD Raptor that was reading at a few megabytes per second. Good thing you were able to retreive your data before it died!
 
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