I own an Elements 2TB drive which worked rather good for years. But now I noticed that it got very very slow. Data on the drive can be accessed , but it takes extremely long. For example the speed test delivers about 0.210 MB/s for read and 0.08 MB/s for write. Even disconnect from PC lasts minutes.
Der Kitfox Short Device Self Test tells: No problems were detected and ShortScan passed without problems.
I checked the drive with a different cable , on a different USB port an on a different PC. Always with the same result.
When a drive becomes usable but slow across different PCs and cables it usually means the disk is struggling to read weak or pending sectors. At this point the safest move is to stop copying large chunks and try to pull your important files off in small batches before it gets worse. If Windows freezes during transfer you can try copying via Safe Mode which sometimes reduces the hangs.
I don’t want to store data to the drive anymore. I just want to restore the saved files from the drive. But there are huge files ( some GB) from a backup tool which would take more than a day for each of them.
Sometimes Windows drops a slow device into PIO mode, which caps speeds to a crawl.
Check: Device Manager> IDE ATA/ATAPI>right-click controller > Properties > Advanced Settings
If Transfer Mode shows PIO, that’s why.
Try running Windows built-in “Error Checking” on the drive. Right click the drive, open Properties, go to Tools, pick “Check” and let it scan for bad spots. This helps Windows avoid the weak areas that slow everything down and can make the drive a bit more responsive so you can copy your big files more easily.
