WD 1TB My Passport Drive EXTREMELY Slow!

Hi, I have a My Passport 1TB external drive.  A few days ago this drive seemed to have crashed on me…  I was really disappointed because this had a lot of my backed up pictures and videos of my kids.

The drive was making the dreaded ticking of death sound.  I did everything I could, I through it in the freezer over night, still nothing… However, after leaving it alone for a few days, I decided to plug it into my Windows box again and see what happened.

Miraculously the ticking was no longer present and the drive appeared in My Computer after about 4 minutes.  After double clicking on the drive it took another minute or so to open up the drive and I saw that all my data was there.

My problem however is that now when I try to transfer all my files off of the My Passport drive back to my PC, it’s exteremely slow, it’s max transfer rate is 70K/b sec… I’m just wondering what this is caused by, maybe my hardware is just bad and I shouldn’t be complaining, but I have like 700GBs of data I need to pull off this drive, at this rate it will take weeks.

I’ve already done a chkdsk /f on the drive and it took a really long time.  Anytime I navigate around inside the drive via Windows Explorer it’s very slow.  I’ve also tried it on my Linux box; same issues.

Any help would be appreciated!!!

Thanks in advanced!

1 Like

I have the same problem

Same Here…!!! Please Respond Since i have a lot of Data on it, so replacing or formatting it will not be an option id consider

I have the same problem and this is driving me mad as i have a lot video which i want to transfer back to my pc

Tan-J wrote:

Same Here…!!! Please Respond Since i have a lot of Data on it, so replacing or formatting it will not be an option id consider

Don’t you have a backup?

mine came without any drivers or firmware on it so it’s taking 3 hours to transfer the 29mb smartware software onto the hdd. It took 8 hours to install the origional drivers it was supposed to come with. I had a full day of good transfer speed and now I’m back down to 16 kb. I leave the country in 3 days. I don’t have 12 days for my information to back itself up. 

Can a mod or tech please answer this thread and explain why your product is such [deleted].

JHolland wrote:

mine came without any drivers or firmware on it so it’s taking 3 hours to transfer the 29mb smartware software onto the hdd. It took 8 hours to install the origional drivers it was supposed to come with. I had a full day of good transfer speed and now I’m back down to 16 kb. I leave the country in 3 days. I don’t have 12 days for my information to back itself up. 

 

Can a mod or tech please answer this thread and explain why your product is such [deleted].

  1. Drivers are installed automatically via windows update when your computer is connected to the internet

  2. The firmware is pre-installed to the drive at the moment it’s manufactured. Since firmware updates are delicate and can kill electronic devices, those are only on the tech site -in case- they are needed

  3. Smartware is installed and loaded into your computer, not the drive. Even if you don’t have a WD drive you can install it from their site, so if it took 3 hours your computer is as fast as a pregnant turtle. 

  4. Your PC has some big issues if it took 8 hours to install a driver, or you are over-exaggerating to the point it’s nonsense.

  5. They have a tech support phone number. Call them.

According to the drivers I just installed on it, no. they weren’t updated automatically. 

at bouncing between 76 bit transfer speed and 5kb, 8 hours is what it took. 

the firmware updater I was told to use couldn’t update anything because there -was- no firmware on the device. My pc works fine.

also, when I work 8-5 pst, I can’t call customer support 6 days out of the week. 

please don’t assume you know what isn’t true.

I have encountered the same issue with my WD Passport 1TB drive. Can anyone please tell me how to solve this problem, because the files contain are important to me. Whenever I plug in the hard drive, it prompt me to unlock the drive. And that’s where the real problem started, the real drive which is the NTFS where all the data is stored, it reads the drive extremely slow. Whenever i click a file, it reads super slow, and jam my computer (not responding). In the end I have to force to unplug the USB to stop hanging my laptop. I have tried defragmenting it and error checking, but it seems to take forever. Tell me is it my hard drive spoilt??? How can I retrieve my data please! I never drop it or damage it in anyways, I always leave put it in my drawer after using it. Does this cause by pulling the USB cable often without properly disable in the taskbar?

David Lee

jiyilee5000@hotmail.com

1 Like

Same here, this is the backup of my backup which got destroyed in a car accident!

Same here. Did every check possible. Windows nor Linux does get any usable transfer rate. Linux says input/output error after some minutes anyway. Seriously, is the no WD official looking into this forum?

I had the same problem. Please update the firmware of the device. This will solve your problem. Goto WD support and select your correct product to download and update the firmware.

Update firmware and It said I had the latest firmware. I installed it anyways and it still responds ridiculously slow.

I also have the same problem!!! My 2 WD portable hard disks suddenly had the same problem together!!!

I have the very same problem. PC can see the drive, folder are coming up, although not very fast. Data transfer is hopelessly slow.

Did anyone find a solution?

Thanks!

Hello guys, 

I am having the exact same issue with my 1TB WD drive.

Whenever the drive is connected with the PC using the USB, the PC finds it after 4~5 minutes. 
Afterwards, whenever I click on a folder that is located on the WD drive, it takes another 3 minutes to select the item.
Opening the folder takes 7~8 minutes and I think it is not right. The first time I have installed the software from the WD Disc, the drive was working perfect, until one day it started to respond very slowly.

Any suggestions different from WD software update?

Kind regards,

Ivo

Hey guys,

It’s me again…
After a great struggle on different PCs and attempts to resolve the issue, I have tried one last step:
On the PC where I have originally had the WD Software installed, I have uninstalled everythin and installed it back again hoping this time it will work.

AND THIS TIME, everything worked as it is supposed to work!

P.s.
I have downloaded the WD SmartWare and WD Drive Utilities from this site and haven’t used the original CD that came with the device.

Hope you find this useful!

Have a nice day and good luck to all of you who have the same issue! :robottongue:

I experienced this problem after I replaced my laptop SDD then made a fresh intallation of Windows 10.

Response from my external drive was really slow and there was a weird sound.

I fixed this by dowloading the WD Universal Firmware Updater from WD Support.

http://download.wdc.com/fwupdater/Win/WDFirmwareUpdater.zip

The app automatically updated my ext hard drive’s firmware. After that I simply restarted my PC and then its back to normal! :wink:

HI I am having same issue. the drive is getting detected after much longer time, giving random I/O error and few of the times asking to format. I’ve updated firmware but still its not responding in standard way.
Please help me out here.

Same problem here … Firmware up to date … Checked with no problems. Same on both my desktop PC and my laptop. Running Windows 10.

Changed “Better Performance” setting in Windows.

Has anyone found a solution to this?

Just to add, that if I am copying / writing, the first 20 seconds performance is fine, then it drops off massively.