I bought a 1tb My Passport (black) from Walmart about 18 months ago. The drive worked well for 3 days. Ever since then it has been ultra slow. I had a lot of important data on the drive but it didnt do me any good because most of the time I couldnt access it anyway. So I finally got fed up today, and I deleted everything. It takes an hour to delete even a zero byte empty folder. So the only way to actually delete the data was to try and reformat the drive. I deleted the partitions first, then I did a quick format using exFAT. It took forever to do all of this. I was hoping it would solve my problem, but it didnt. I am trying to run a scan on it now. I am scanning for bad sectors and whatnot. But here is the thing… I bought this drive, and paid for the warranty. I registered the drive too… Guess what? No one will help me. I cant even get a replacement drive. Hell, I cant even get an answer as to why this piece of ■■■■ has been garbage since day one. I never once dropped it, I never over-heated it, I have never done anything to it that could cause this ■■■■. It is just a garbage drive and I want a ■■■■■■■ new one, or better yet how about giving me my money back.
Every one is having same problem so do I but does anyone got any solution…
my hard disk gives 50kb/sec speed now… don’t know what to do…
I had a 4 TB WD My Passport Ultra. The P/N shows WDBYFT0040BBK-0A; S/N shows WX41D5873FY4; product of Malaysia. The extreme data transfer problem issues directed me here. I’ve tried the “Stupid’s Solution” of “Better Performance” in the Policies.
Naturally that didn’t work. Then I’d downloaded the Universal Windows Firmware Updater. I’ve noticed that the Updater itself is of 2017. However, it showed that the firmware is up to date.
This problem was reported on Dec. 12, 2013. Since then lots of other people had asked for the solution. Today is Apr. 17, 2019. It’s nearing 6 years, but nobody from Western Digital cared to answer even once. Actually, they didn’t even acknowledged this problem!
I have Transcend 3 TB, also SanDisk. They don’t have this problem.
I’ve tested my WD 4 TB in Windows 10 Pro x64, Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64, and Windows 7 x86. Everything is okay in those PC and laptops. So the problem is with the WD 4 TB. Actually its a hardware issue which WD can’t fix!
Sadly I had to say that WD can’t make a USB hard disk!
I can’t believe I wasted 30 mins reading this discussion and no one had a solution. What’s the point of these forums if WD or no one gets involved? Ridiculous.
I have same issue with My Passport 1T
SOLUTION After a lot of pocking on why my 3 TB WD drive was so unbearably slow I too searched the internet and was surprised to find nothing. So I did several things and first took my drive to my old PC and it worked fine, so I knew it was not a drive problem. The quick fix for me was to turn off windows defender. Or any file check security software you might be running. In the bottom left Search for Win 10 type “Virus & Threat protection”. Once open select it and then select “Real Time Protection”. Select so it shows Off.
I did this during a slow download that was running from 100-400KB/s and after I applied the change and windows signaled the risk alert the speed jumped to 34MB/s. Much better Hope this helps. I am sure others will immediately grab this and post it as theirs on you tube. Good Luck
PS I am sure there are other ways to change the drive/file security profile but just remember to re-enable it when you’re done.
I have a 1TB My Passport that was sitting in a draw.
Today, I tried transferring files off it but it was very slow so I stopped and unplugged the USB cable from the computer.
After that, Windows could not recognize the drive or partition.
Could it be that the partition table or something was damaged because it was not ejected?
After a while, it started mounting again and I’m running a chkdsk now.
Cross fingers that I can backup the files afterwards.
Ok, it turns out that there is a SMART failure.
More specifically, at the level of the reallocated sector count.
So there are some bad sectors on the drive.
I did manage to recover 100% of my photos using Testdisk and recommend this utility.
I had this same problem, drive took ages to be recognised by my computer. When it finally showed up it was almost impossible to navigate and transfering files in either direction was impossible. However I fixed my drive…although I lost my data. However since I fixed it the problem has not reoccurred.
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I got rid of the Smartware password protecting software.
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I used the firmware updater and updated to the latest firmware.
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I used a program called ‘EaseUS Partition Master’ to delete all partitions on the drive.
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I changed the drive from GPT to MBR
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I created a new NTFS logical partition the full size of the drive 1tb (931gb in reality!)
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Drive has great Read/Write speeds and hasn’t had any problems since.
Same issue, i try those software mentioned above but still no changes.
Worked for me. Thanks very much.
I encountered this problem. Tried all of the aboeve and the only two actions that improved my backup speed using the drive were to temporarily disable the antivirus and change the power mode from “Best battery life” to “Best performance”.
It might be that it was only one of these actions that was slowing down the transfer. But I’m just happy i’ve got my drive to work at an acceptable speed now.
I am having the same issue. I dropped my drive once or twice and it became excruciatingly slow.
I acquired another similarly sized drive to mirror it (bit-by-bit, using dd in Linux, but there are other ways) so that I can recover my data. It is best not to do any other operations on the drive such as normal file copy, deletion, etc, as it is obviously not in a normal state.
I noticed that it starts of fine for a very short while then slows down to a crawl. about 200 something KB/second. I calculated that at this rate it would take between 3 and 4 months of continuous (24h) operation to mirror all 2GB. It took me considerable time just to go through the first 600MB.
Anyway after transferring over 600MB at a snails pace, I interrupted the transfer, disconnected the drive then re-connected it. I then launched dd again using the skip and seek parameters (with bs=1MB) to skip the first 600MB and more or less pick up where I left. It was fast and remained fast, so far it has transferred 27GB at a 22MB/s pace which is much more reasonable. (update: it seems to have hit a “sticky patch” at 27GB and is slowing down).
My theory is that when the magnetic head hits a particular (presumably damaged) patch then the transfer rate slows down and stays slow until the drive is restarted. So when it happens again, I just wait to pass the “patch”, then disconnect, reconnect and pick up where I left.
I would recommend against trying to copy your folders using this method, because it would cause the head to seek all over the place and probably trigger the issue.
You can mirror the disk with dd or disk cloning software (or hardware).
I had/currently have the same issue. I moaned enough that they finally swapped it for another one. That was a VERY PAINFUL process. Anyway, the new one is super slow, too… I keep getting told to run programs that work on windows (that I’m fairly confident will do nothing to solve this) despite telling them I USE A MAC!
Funny thing is, I have a box full of WD hard drives from the 2000s in a box that still work just fine. (Yeah, they’re slow… but they’re old…)
I finally gave up and got a Samsung T7. Holy ■■■■ it’s fast! And hassle free! Love it! WD can e@t me.
