WD Elements Issue

spluff · 5 Aug 2023 at 09:53

I have a WD Elements External Hard drive which I store media on.

Some media buffers at random places.

If I copy this media back to my PC the speed can vary dramatically from full speed to a few kb/s

If I then copy the media back to hd it works fine (I presume its been copied to different sectors)

I have done a CHKDSK on my drive and it brings up no errors.

Any ideas what the problems is? and is there a tool which can be used to mark all sectors unusable which are faulty?

(its not bandwidth issues)

fish · 5 Aug 2023 at 11:14

Filling dram on the drive? Lots of small files? Could be many things but usually writing will show drive limitations (hardware shortcoming by the manufacture) much more than just reading from the drive

darael · 5 Aug 2023 at 14:07

You could try a full format on the drive, which will help to find bad sectors or possibly even refresh the weak ones. Something like HD Tune Pro can give you an idea of the slow spots too.

spluff · 5 Aug 2023 at 20:24

Ok thank you will try hd tune pro.

It’s a drive with a lot of big media files. I don’t think I have enough space to copy of all the files onto another drive to format unfortunately.

embalse · 6 Aug 2023 at 00:22

spluff said:
I don’t think I have enough space to copy of all the files onto another drive to format unfortunately.

You can never have enough back up drives if not loosing data it a priority. If you don't have enough space I would get another drive, copy the data over then format the original drive. Two back ups are better than one.

embalse · 6 Aug 2023 at 00:24

spluff said:
I don’t think I have enough space to copy of all the files onto another drive to format unfortunately.

You can never have enough back up drives if not loosing data it a priority. If you don't have enough space I would get another drive, copy the data over then format the original drive. Two back ups are better than one.

Snapshot · 7 Aug 2023 at 11:43

embalse said:
You can never have enough back up drives if not loosing data it a priority. If you don't have enough space I would get another drive, copy the data over then format the original drive. Two back ups are better than one.

Is that why you said it twice?

embalse · 7 Aug 2023 at 11:45

Snapshot said:
Is that why you said it twice?

No idea how that happened. Better have some coffee..

.

HungryHippos · 7 Aug 2023 at 11:52

Check the SMART data via Crystal Disk Info and see if it's reporting any issues.

spluff · 7 Aug 2023 at 17:50

Decided to delete some files and then copy the rest to hard drive.

The good files are copying at 55MB/s but drops to a few KB/s on the one that buffer....

Will formating fix the drive so when i copy back it wont do it again?

OspreyO · 7 Aug 2023 at 17:59

I've one portable drive that does this. Had it few years. Think it's WD P10. I assume it's a buffer issue. I use it as a non critical backup drive.

Eddie99 · 7 Aug 2023 at 18:00

What capacity is the drive? Lower capacity drives could be SMR which have slow write speeds. It's also worth checking if you get the same speed with a different file copy application like TeraCopy.

OspreyO · 7 Aug 2023 at 18:35

Mine is 4TB I usually use FileSynch with it. Does the same thing. I just let it go up and down and it gets there in the end. I had tried to use it on my Nvidia shield but it spins up so slowly I had to revert it to backup drive.

Eddie99 · 7 Aug 2023 at 18:43

OspreyO said:
I've one portable drive that does this. Had it few years. Think it's WD P10. I assume it's a buffer issue. I use it as a non critical backup drive.

OspreyO said:
Mine is 4TB I usually use FileSynch with it. Does the same thing. I just let it go up and down and it gets there in the end. I had tried to use it on my Nvidia shield but it spins up so slowly I had to revert it to backup drive.

All higher capacity portable 2.5" drives (over 2TB) will be SMR garbage.

OspreyO · 7 Aug 2023 at 19:14

It's the only one of my external 4 or 5 tb drives that does it. If they are all SMR that's not the reason.

spluff · 7 Aug 2023 at 21:41

I have run CrystalDiskInfo on it

Read error rate is Red and data for it say 18371 (threshold 51) - Pre Failure imminent loss of data

Also

Current Pending Sector Count for data says 19 and is a warning.

Chkdsk and format are all Okay.

Is there anything I can do to salvage this drive or mark sectors as bad?

spluff · 8 Aug 2023 at 08:03

This is the model of hd - Western Digital RWDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN

spluff · 8 Aug 2023 at 09:11

Did a format to exFat and copied some media back and its a constant 103 - 107 MB/s with no drop offs.........

Eddie99 · 8 Aug 2023 at 14:50

spluff said:
This is the model of hd - Western Digital RWDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN

4TB 2.5" portable drive will be SMR which will affect write performance, but after checking your original post you had issues with read speed.

Do you have any reallocated sectors in CrystalDiskInfo after formatting it and writing new data to it?

HungryHippos · 8 Aug 2023 at 14:58

spluff said:
I have run CrystalDiskInfo on it

Read error rate is Red and data for it say 18371 (threshold 51) - Pre Failure imminent loss of data

Also

Current Pending Sector Count for data says 19 and is a warning.

Chkdsk and format are all Okay.

Is there anything I can do to salvage this drive or mark sectors as bad?

spluff said:
Did a format to exFat and copied some media back and its a constant 103 - 107 MB/s with no drop offs.........

I don't profess to be an expert but maybe the reformat has helped it organise data around the bad sectors.

Either way I wouldn't keep anything important on that drive if smart has a bunch of errors and it's been giving you performance issues.