Not fully working USB 3.0 cable impact on data stored on HDD

Hello, during the last days I’ve noticed that my WD My Passport 4TB portable disk was going slowly when reading data (around 35-40 MB/s). I have used this disk only to store my movies as mkv files and since the extraction process is much slower, I’ve never realized that there was a speed issue until I started moving the HDD content to a new WD Elements 10TB external disk.
After digging around on various forum I’ve found that the USB cable coming with my disk has a problem and changing it with a good one restores the drive speed, that now is around 100-110MB/s.
What I want to know is if I can trust or not the content stored on this HDD because I spent a lot of time extracting movies and to do it all over again would be really painful. My guess is: since the cable was working even if not at full speed, it might be that the USB protocol was able to grant data integrity at a lower transfer speed, but I need some WD expert to tell me.

Hi,

You could refer to the following link: Drive Performance Speed and Benchmarking

Hi Jonty, thank you for your reply. I’ve read that article you pointed to me but I think it’s not completely fitting my case, it just tells that if you have performance degradation, one of the possible culprit is the cable, but it doesn’t tell much about data integrity, probably because it’s not a real problem! I mean, I’ve transferred/copied more than 4TB of data over that faulty cable and using md5sum I have checked that every file has been copied correctly between the hard drives and the result is: there is not a single different file. I hardly believe there is more need for proof that even if a USB 3.0 cable is damaged but still working, data integrity is not compromised. So my question probably has already its answer: until data can be moved, you don’t need to care about data integrity because USB 3.0 protocol does.

bad cable. i seen it a lot in usb and hdmi cables. it happens.