I have a 2TB “My passport”, and sometimes while I’m listening to music the song randomly skips, even though It happens maybe once every through 2 or 3 songs, It’s unbearable. And this also happens with videos, but not that often.
So, what I did is to perform some HDTune pro tests and what showed up is that sometimes It gets high random access times, here is the screenshot,
Okay, so that test is spotless, there isn’t a problem with the drive itself.
I’m thinking that it might be a problem with other devides on the USB hub. You could try downloading USB view from http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/USBView.shtml or the official microsoft page. Basically there are USB hubs and you have multiple devices connected, there is a pool of bandwidth and power and each devices take a share of that. Extremely high performance USB devices (like the turtle beach gaming headsets) strongly suggest not to have these devices sharing a hub with anything else.
Basically if you run that it will show you all of your USB controllers, try moving things around physically until the passport is the only device on the controller if you can manage it, but at least the only device on the hub.
Songs are tiny in size, but long to play - so lets say you have a 1 minute sleep timer, and when your player goes to retrieve the song, it reyrieves about a minute and a half of data -
by the time your software goes to get the next chunk of data, the drive is sleeping, and needs to spin up.
During this time, your player cannot get the new data, and therefore “skips” (repeats the last chunk of data it has) until the drive is ready.
Trey setting the sleep timer to “never” and see if that cures it.
As you can see in WD Smartware I don’t have access to any timer options, but I do have in WD Drive Utilities, which is the one shown down here, even though I have set It to “Never” (It was set to 30 min before so I guess It shouldn’t change anything) the problem remains the same. This is getting really annoying, trusted WD for what, this poor support, nobody from the staff, but they answer newer threads, that’s great support.
