Extremely weird issue with a 5TB WD Passport

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I got this drive as a rma replacement after the previous one got bad sectors. This new one was working fine for the last few months except a weird issue that’s been happening for the last few days.

Whenever I’m downloading a big file like a tv series like with torrent client it can take upwards of an hour. The file gets downloaded no issues but previously whenever I downloaded something similar the drive spin down and go silent after some time and the temperature would go from something like 43c+ to 36c or below.

But now even after the download is finished and the drive is not being used, it still keeps on spinning (it makes sound like something being written or read) and get pretty warm like 45c+. Task manager would show zero usage on the drive during this.

Now when I tried to copy those download tv shows/videos to another drive the speed would barely touch 15MBps while other similar videos previously downloaded on the same drive get copied at upwards of 70MBps.

The moment I delete those downloaded files, the drive would spin down after some time and temperature would slowly go down to normal like 34-36c.

Now if download the same files on another drive and copy it over to my WD drive, there would be no such issue. These files can now be copied at normal speeds to other drives.

I dunno what’s wrong and at my wits end. Please help.

Model - WDC WD50NDZW-11BCSS0 and about 900GB free space left.

2

Hi @imx455

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:

3

I did actually and they asked me to run WD utilities and send them the screenshot image. The SMART and quick tests came back OK. Cyrstaldiskinfo -

Screenshot (6549)
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Now another thing I noticed is that when I connected another 1TB WD Elements drive to my pc it also showed the exact same behavior as the 5TB passport. Like any new videos I download and copy to the PC’s internal drives barely reach 15-20 MBps while older videos already present on both the drives get copied to my pc’s internal drive at 70+ MBps. Also if I make a copy of the video on the same external drive (both passport and elements) then try to copy/move this “copy” to internal drive this now goes at full speed.
I’ve tried drives on other PC’s and got the same behavior there too. At this point I can’t even tell what’s wrong. Any help appreciated.

4

It’s probably an SMR model. These will bog down during extended writes after the cache is exhausted and the shingles need to be rewritten.

https://hddscan.com/blog/2020/hdd-wd-smr.html

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50697/~/steps-to-determine-if-an-internal-drive-uses-cmr-or-smr-technology

5

That doesn’t seem like it. While these are SMR models, I’ve have used models like these non-stop for years without any issues. And for two separate drives to develop the same issue at the same time is a bit too much of coincidence. I feel there’s something else at play.