I purchased my WD element (2TB) portable HDD on the 4th of October and to sum this up real quick it originally had a write speed of 110MB/s and now it’s averaging anywhere from 30MB/s to 19MB/s. This is really bad considering a hard drive I got years ago pulls 80MB/s.
I also found out the cable that it came with restricted the device to 2.0 and had to change it over with another 3.0 cable I had. I talked to WD and they said they would send me a new one but I never got it.
I’ve been using the hard drive, like some other ones I had which have never had a problem, for recording videos in 1080p 30/fps which means I do need a good write speed to keep the recordings FPS above a constant rate (note i’m not talking about my computers FPS, I’m talking about the frames that the recording software can write which is restricted by write speed)
So yeah, what would be the best way about getting a replacement for my HDD.
Sounds like the unit averaging USB 2.0 speeds, if you already tried using a different USB cable and different connections, make sure that you check that you are using the drive on native USB 3.0 ports.
Yeah i’ve got another drive running at 3.0 so I pulled that drive out and plugged the WD one.
But I’ve just tried it again and it did actually get to 90MB/s for 2 tests then started varying test to test from 90 to 40-30 and is now stuck on 40-30 again.
Sorry to hear about your slow drive my friend! I have had the same problem myself a few times with various drives…
After reading about the issue with your drive, I immediately jumped to thinking that maybe the Cache on your drive has filled up…
Basically, when you transfer so many files to a drive, the performance of that drive slows down, which is probably why your drive is dropping from over 100mbps to less than 30mbps after several transfers…
One way to test this, is to eject and disconnect the drive from your device and then re-insert it and try transferring again to see if the performance increases…
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any other fixes for this, but I hope this helps man!
It is very likely that your hard drive is running out of space. I’ve encountered a similar issue before. After clearing out most of the data, the drive’s speed improved somewhat.
I have had the same problem myself a few times with various drives…
