WD5000AAKS "write speed" VERY slow

I have an 8 year old drive that up until the last few weeks really never gave me any cause for concern.

It seems recently that I noticed the drive lagging at times and open windows often displaying “(not responding)” in the title bar of each window. This was happening with programs that I’ve used many times before and I knew something was going on, but couldn’t put my finger on the problem.

I opened up Task Manager and noticed that the “Write Speed” was very low and often never got above 2.1 GB/s, however the “Read Speed” would be much higher than that while copying files and running programs.

I’m running Windows10 Ultimate with Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33 GHz and 3.0 GB RAM (DDR2).

I went to the Windows Store and found a VERY simple program called “PC Benchmark” that I downloaded and ran and the “linear write speeds” averaged 0.7 GB/s while the “linear read speed” hit speeds near 70GB/s.

Obviously, a VAST difference… but consistent with the numbers I was seeing in Windows “Task Manager”.

I’ve considered some ideas like disabling Anti-Virus temporarily and even did a Win10 “repair” opting to keep old files rather than reformat and attempt a “clean install”… (yet).

My question is… is this just a classic, early sign of drive failure ???

I’ve run Data Lifeguard Tools on the drive and it passed the S.M.A.R.T. tests and Full Scan Tests… so I’m scratching my head here.

I read some posts here suggesting some have had issues with this model… but it’s worked reliably for me for 8+ years and I’ve never had a “true fail/death” of an HDD on any of my computers.

Perhaps, this will be my first one ???

Hi there,

Do you get any errors on the computer while copying files or moving files from and to the drive?