[ursus101]

Hello,

I bought about 2.5 years ago an external hard drive WD My Book Essential edition (250Gb) that worked pretty well so far. However, about a month ago it began to behave strangely. When I copy files from external hard drive it goes reasonably fast, but when I write files on the drive, it is extremely slow (to transfer a movie of about 1.4 Gb in size takes ~45 minutes). Because the hard drive was almost full, I thought it is somehow related, or disk fragmentation, etc. The problem started aggravating so now I cannot write files at all. To make sure that this is not due to USB 2.0 connection, I took an actual hard drive from its enclosure and connected directly through EIDE interface. The same story.

Yesterday, I transferred all my files to another drive and removed all partitions on external hard drive. I ran HD Tune program to search for bad sectors. It reported only one bad sector. I started "read" sector tests, they went all successfully. when I am trying to perform "write" tests, the disk "freezes" and does not show any sign of activity. After 10 min program aborts with "I/O error".

Here is basically the question: is it dying? Is there anything that I can use to revive the drive? Why is reading fine, while writing on disk fails? Did anyone encounter something similar?

 

[raptor_pa]

Disks read and write with different segments of the head and using different electronics. The error checking is also different. It sounds as if there is an issue with something on the write side. No software solutions really, this might be one of those situations where spinrite maight do some good, I generally don't recommend it since it really works the drive hard, but if the errors are on write, and there are only some bad sectors, it may clean it up - too many bad sectors, or if it is a bad head, then nothing is going to help it.

 

[ursus101]

Disks read and write with different segments of the head and using different electronics

It explains weird hard drive behavior. It seems that it is time to say goodbye to my hard drive. I tried SpinRite yesterday. "Examining the surface" mode detected a few bad sectors in one spot on the disk and went till the end. However, running SpinRite in any mode that involves reading/writing (like refresh surface, recover data, etc.) goes extremely slow, estimated time to finish is >1000 hours and many write errors appear. I think I may consider myself lucky as it was possible to copy all the data from hard drive.

 

[raptor_pa]

Spinrite being slow isn't unusual LOL, although that is slower than expectd Yeah definitely lucky you were able to get your data off the disk - time to start shopping.