SAME HERE! After my two drives performed well for well over a year using firewire 800, I am now experiencing the same symptoms. I use one drive to back up the other, and copy operations are now always interrupted by mysterious long pauses where the drive is 100% busy but no data is being transferred. During this time the white light is lit solid from top to bottom, then it begins a slow up-and-down pattern while the copy is at a standstill. After several minutes, the copy resumes and stats will show normal, fluctuating, disk usage and acceptable transfer rates.
If Windows initially estimated that it will take 2 hours to transfer the folder, each long pause causes the estimate to become longer and longer. 20% into the copy it now estimates completion in 11 hours if performance doesn’t get even worse. If you have the patience, the copy will complete without any errors.
In opening a ticket, WD missed the whole point and responded that the drive spins down after 10 minutes when it is inactive. Oh, is that so, right in the middle of a copy? Well, that’s disturbing enough indeed, and just shows that either they didn’t understand my symptoms or that they simply chose to ignore them.
Also, opening certain files on the drive sometimes takes forever, and a thumbnail display of a certain photo will get hung up for several minutes before it finally refreshes. And the most disturbing thing is that sometimes the whole drive will disconnect itself and I have to hold the power button in the back to turn it off/on. Then it will reconnect until the next time it happens.
Windows 7 claims the drives are working normally. But after reading these posts, I’m beginning to think that the drives only last a year and that these symptoms are indications that the units are struggling in their final days before they go belly-up. The long pauses are probably some kind of built-in error-recovery mechanism that WD probably doesn’t want to expound upon. WD - you can chime in here; I don’t want to spread misinformation, but your insight would certainly be helpful in this forum (read: vacuum of useful information) that you’ve created for us.
