My WD drive is almost 2 years old and I recently noticed that its transfer speeds suddenly slowed down. When copying files, the speed was relatively normal before, but now it is obviously much slower. What should I check first?
@cecilia5
What size drive do you have? How much storage/data is on the drive? How much free space does it have now?
When writing more data to your drive it will probably take more time for it to find an area/sector to place the data on.
My hard drive has a capacity of 2TB. I’ve used about 1.3TB so far, leaving around 700GB of free space. The transfer speed used to be normal, but it has slowed down significantly lately.
My hard drive has a capacity of 2TB. I’ve used about 1.3TB so far, leaving around 700GB of free space. The transfer speed used to be normal, but it has slowed down significantly lately.
@cecilia5
You can buy a larger capacity device to improve the speed but check the drive speed that it operates with. A Solid-State Drive (SSD) works faster than an HDD.
Most likely need to defragment the drive.
Okay, I’ll look up how to defragment the hard drive.
Check the SMART report:
https://ww.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/index/smart/
First check whether the drive is simply running out of free space and whether Windows is seeing any disk errors, because both can cause a previously normal WD drive to slow down. Also test one large file rather than a folder full of small files, then try the drive directly on another USB port and PC. WD specifically lists low free space, file size, USB ports, cables, hubs, background activity and drive health as possible causes. If the slowdown happens even with a large file on another PC, I’d stop stressing the drive and check its health before doing anything else.
