WD20EARS - massive drop in performance

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hi, I have a serious problem with an WD20EARS SATA harddrive. The (read) performance has dropped massively and Windows won’t start or it takes half an hour when drive is connected. Currently I’m trying to backup my data but it’ll take hundrets of years for the remaining 1,3 TB.

Quite strange as the read rate gows up and down.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Thx & rgds

JGB

2

First thing you should try is testing the drive for possible errors.

You can use our Data Lifeguard Diagnostics software.

See the link bellow for more information:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/940

Backing up the data is the best idea to avoid losing data in the event of a drive failure.

3

thanks John for your reply!

Backing up data is surely a good idea but how to do that with read rates mostly below 100k/s. I managed to read about 200GB of the 1,3TB within 3 or 4 days now.

I’ve tried Data Lifeguard Diagnostics but it even doesn’t see the drive. However it shows me 4 times the same drive (same serial). I guess this is a program error as it doesn’t seem to handle my 4bay external drive case attached via eSata.

I had to teake the WD20EARS out of my PC as I windows complaint about the drive and the boot would take endless time. Now running it on an external SATA2USB controller. Maybe not the best way but the only that works at the moment.

Some freeware tools would show all my drives correctly and also read the S.M.A.R.T from the WD20EARS what the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics fails to do. Not surprisngly I get som warnings  and a fail:

Raw Read Error Rate  186727   failed   
Reallocated Sector Count   warning  
Reallocated Event Count  warning  
Current Pending Sector  986 warning 

This doesn’t look good in fact :frowning:

Any recommendation? Do I have to worry about other WD20EARS drives as well?

thx & cu

Joerg

4

what is the temperature?

can you keep the temperature at 20 - 30 degrees celsious?

i wuld recomend it :slight_smile: