I have a WD 3TB external drive which is about 5 months old now. I have been using it primarily to store recorded gameplay footage (the footage is saved directly to the drive while recording), which takes up a lot of space in good quality. I don’t know if it happened after I started doing this, but the drive became really slow and sluggish - especially when opening the folder containing the video footage. It could take 5-10 mins to just load the thumbnails of all the videos, and somethimes the drive would just shut off and I would have to re-insert the USB cable.
Today, when I wen’t into the folder, it stopped responding so I had to force it down. I took out the USB cable and re-inserted it, and since then Windows 7 have never properly recognized the drive - it don’t show up as a drive in My Computer and I can’t access it.
I get the little USB connect sound when I plug it in, I can hear and feel the drive wind up, the little light is flashing and getting stable and I can eject it which shuts it down. I have WD SmartWare installed which just shows this message all the time:
It says Used 0%, but it should be 50% full. I have tried everything in the stickied thread with no difference. The drive have latest firmware and my Windows 7 is fully updated. Would you say the drive is dead, or should I attempt some recovery?
