About to loose 1TB of data (WD10JPVX)

Ok guys, this is the story:

I got handed over a colleague’s Lenovo laptop for repair last week. It won’t boot due to the harddrive being extremely slow. I hooked the harddrive up internally to a desktop computer, and soon realized that something was wrong, because it took ages until the drive got recognized and the partition table loaded. I could,. however, eventually see all partitions and read some test files, but it took way too long.

Using a diagnostics tool (HD Tune Pro) I looked at the SMART parameters, which all were just fine. However, HDTune does also have some benchmarking functionality, usually the tests take around 1 minute or so. As I tried some, none would even ever hit the 1% done mark before I lost patience (approx 15 minutes wait time). Same with the Hdtune surface scan, it didn’t complete checking even the first block of sectors. And SMART did still say it was all fine.

I checked the HD drivers UDMA mode, it says UDMA 5.

Next I tried Data Lifeguard Diagnostics, it did perform much the same as HDtune, it took very long for the drive to be loaded, but then I got a “drive OK”. I did then try the quick test, it wouldn’t even complete the first step, instead, after some time, fail suspecting “faulty cabeling”.

I tried three different machines now, and 3 operating systems (W10, W7, and a bootable live Linux CD), and fresh sets of SATA cables, and a SATA/USB adapter, all show the same behaviour.

Right now I try to clone the disk to a SSD of sufficient size, and the process seems to succeed, but it took 1 night (6 hrs) to reach the 1GB mark, if this speed (copy tool gives readings between 200 and 400kB/sec) persists, and if I manage to keep the computer on 24/7, i’ll get my copy around Christmas 2020. And nobody can tell whether the data will be OK, or whether I end up looking at a target disk full of trash data.

And SMART does still not show any indication of a drive fault.

Has anyone ever seen a harddrive behave like this?

Greetings from Germany, Armin.