40+ years in DP/IT and I have seen this over and over again in the last few years. I’m sorry, but my experience with WD external drives as a whole has not been favorable. More especially the version of drives that have the USB interface incorporated into the electronics package of the hard drive. Though I have not been able to find the specific cause, the drive is acting as if the read impulse parameters have ‘slipped’. What I mean is, the head is essentially reading magnetic ‘pulses or changes in magnetic regions’ as it flies over the disk. The ‘pulses’ need to be powerful enough to trigger a response from the electronics. If the strength of the pulse is outside of parameters the electronics package commands multiple reads of that location. Way back in ‘the day’, drives could slowly magnetise their heads and this would cause the magnetised regions on the disk to slowly become ‘not strong enough to be heard clearly’. One good indication of this is repeated CRC errors. Sadly, most of the windows type operating systems don’t tell you that is what is wrong. You need to use more ‘technical’ software to perform the read. I am currently trying to salvage a drive that a friend gave me that has ‘his whole world’ on it. So far, all I’ve lost is a hand full of music files. So far, I’ve been working on extracting data from this drive for more than 200 hours. So far, I have told him to avoid drives with the USB electronics incorporated into the drive electronics. I like being able to pull a drive out of the package and hook it directly to a computer. Can’t do it with this drive. Do you think he would have a heart attack if I told him how much I usually charge paying customers? Time to send this drive to Ontrack or someone like that to salvage it. I shudder to think of what it will take to salvage one of the new ‘helium’ drives if they crash. Backup, backup, backup… that means don’t use one drive three times, it means use three drives and rotate them… FREQUENTLY!!! How valuable IS your data?
Hello Everyone,
I bought a My passport for Mac in apple store , I used this device as a time machine back up for the past five years. All my graduation document ,photos , family photos ( wedding, Kids…) everything is in my laptop and back up regularly in the Time machine back up( WD- My passport for mac).
My mac book pro crashed during their update, when I tried to use the time machine back up, which is extremely slow and cannot work as a time machine back up.
When I tried to copy the folders it almost took my an hour or sometimes 6 hours to open the folder. However, I can able to copy 30 percent of my document like this over the period of 3 months. To copy a 1 GB file it took me almost a week time. My happiness is , I am able to retrieve those information.
There are still almost more the 800GB to be copied, Is there any one help me find what is going wrong.
Apple blame it on WD, I know it is going to pointing fingers.
It looks like in future everyone need to have a two back up.
I tried to repair using mac, which doesn’t let me proceed.
I tried to use WD tools to update the firmware ( which says hardware is corrupted )
I am wondering is anyone can help me to find a solution, I need my documents from my passport WD.
I am Having the same issue all my important data in the wd hdd, please help it is very slow and hanging the windows
does not work
I cannot see a proper solution to this problem from WD they keep silent
Same problem here. New hard drive on laptop so it’s not that. Very slow to recognize the drive. WD drive (hardware) tested fine. Uninstalled software and reinstalled. Just want to get my data off of it.
I have a same problem too:(
Good morning. I own a data recovery company in Maryland and I fix these all of the time.
If the drive spins and continues to spin without clicking you have what is called a slow responding problem. The good news is that the data can be retrieved but you need a specialized tool like a PC3000 (which costs multiple thousands of dollars). Any good data recovery company should be able to get the data for you.
I have 2 WD Drive, both were having the same issue. Suddenly very slow to detect,
Hi everyone i had the same problem and i was searching the solution for it and then tried to format the hard drive with exFat format and after it finished
i copied a movie to the drive and it works it goes up to 25 mbps you all should give it a try hope it solve your problem also
I have a simular problem, except its 2018 and clearly Western Digital hasn’t done anything to resolve this matter.
I purchased a WD My Book 4tb external HD and spent 5 days copying files to it from my internal HD’s and when I had the drive nearly filled up it started acting like it was dying, which was of great concern as I was barely pushing the HD to its limit. I should point out that I do not have the click of death, although everything else indicates the drive is nearing death as it is a piece of ■■■■.
Now for the past 3 days I have been moving the files from the drive and getting ridiculous transfer rates. I tried everything to resolve the matter, reinstalled everything, checked everything, searched for solutions, contacted tech support, etc, with no success.
I’d venture to say that WD designed the HD’s to perform as they do and built them to be very frail.
If any find a solution i will be very happy.
I am surprise no one realize the problem appear when the hdd have data over 50% of the total capacity. the speed is this if hdd is under 50% those drivers are amzing, if you pas 50% speed go in 1/2, close to 80% the transfer speed is about 2Mb. 90% forget about it.
that firmware think is just to keep you busy and have nothing to do with.
Will be nice if any from WD can replay to this problem.
Same problem here.
Just, I found a turn around to take back my files 
- connect the drive and launch robocopy immediately
- it starts fast and slow down after about 1mn, then CTRL-C and properly disconnect and reconnect
- it copy 300 to 900 Mb each time at reasonable speed
A little bit tricky, but far faster than just waiting.
Can anybody confirm ?
Hi all
had the same issue. chkdsk /r took way too long for me (probably days), so i never completed it. I updated the firmware, ran the WD diagnositics software (short version only because the extensive test would take days).
Tried all of the stuff i found on the web, including switching the policy to “better performance”, nothing helped.
HOWEVER i have good news:
here is how i fixed the issue: I started the windows device manager and clicked on “properties” of my WD external HD. Then i went to the driver settings and UNINSTALLED the device. Unplugged it, rebooted the PC and plugged the WD external hard drive back into the USB 3 port. Now i have transfer rates of up to 100Mb/S
I assume some of you really might have hardware problems, however, for me, it was a simple driver issue…
btw: Win 10
Hi all,
I know the topic may be outdated, since it’s 2018 already, but I still do have WD My Passwport Ultra 2Tb
and I SOLVED THE PROBLEM of slow working.
I read all the thread and noticed a post by Raymund_Arthur, he suggested to update the firmware.
And it really helped!
So go to their official website > downloads Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support
you need “WD Universal Firmware Updater for Windows” or “… for Mac” if you’re on Mac.
Download it, install it, restart your PC - it will update your external drive to the latest version.
Today (2018, Aug 5), it updated from 1.0.6 to 1.2.2 and now on Windows 8.1 it works PERFECTLY!
Hope it helps!
I too had this issue with my daughters external WD Passport Ultra on which she had her thesis and no backups.I tried updating the firmware with no change - the drive still took 4-5 minutes to be recognized and never actually could be opened to see files (even after an hour or so).
I took the drive to local drive repair place with a clean room and they barely examined it and then quoted a recovery cost of $2275 (including parts). That was just ridiculous but if nothign else worked we would have had to pay the price.
So, we took the drive home and I started looking at it. I had a partition utility called AOMEI (standard edition) that could see the drive name and the free/used space. That was encouraging since data was coming off the drive. I ran an option called Check Partition which runs chkdsk.exe and it started finding and correcting file and disk errors and after about 40 minutes it had finished. When I rebooted, I could now see the drive properly and all the files were back and performance was restored. You can probably do the same thing by just running chkdsk.exe on your own.
I hope that helps someone else with a similar issue. It saved me days of waiting and a lot of money.
Having same issue. Hard drive responds much lately. Transfer rate is between 0 kb/s to 700kb/s. It is taking 4 hours to transfer even 800 mb of data
My oem 10 year old 500gb drive haw same problem its now for storing data, when temperature is high it clicks and dont want to boot. When it is recognized it starts to read only 500KB Can firmware update can fix this?
December 2018. So, 5 years and counting and still no resolution? Not one WD support technician thought to address the issue? Are we in the wrong thread? Not one suggestion? Really?
Surely, WD has been made aware of the issue since 2013? And yet, despite knowing the devices are prone to such costly complications, they continue to produce and sell such defective products without any notice, explanation or resolution?
I am just amazed there has not been one response from WD this whole time.
Can somebody say class action?
If anyone can provide any other suggestions besides the firmware update (not working for my passport 1TB). I am all ears.
same here d2d
like ur videos btw
