World Book: Incredibly Slow After Windows 10

Good Afternoon,

I have an older World Book external drive (WD My Book World Edition). We use it in our office as a drive on the network for central access to files amongst employees. Recently I began the process of updating all computers to Windows 10 and it seems that, at the same time, employees began complaining of severe slowness when accessing the drive. I have personally experienced it as well, sometimes taking 2-3 minutes to open a directory when it should take a second. We’re barely using any of the storage space and the directories being accessed by most employees are pretty small in terms of number of files and storage space.

I’ve been researching this issue for a week and initially found two potential problems:

  1. Driver Conflict: The driver for this particular WD is old and not compatible with WIndows 10. I learned that this isn’t a huge issue since a driver (from WD) isn’t really required as Microsoft can support it. So, I uninstalled the driver allowing Windows to configure it as it wished and the driver/configuration issue was resolved. I no longer get any driver or other malfunctioning errors for the drive.  Unfortunately , this did not resolve the problem.
  2. Adobe: We are mostly paperless and utilize Adobe Pro X, so almost everything we touch is a PDF. My investigation found similar slowness issues after Windows 10 that were releated to Adobe, notably the security settings within the application itself. I followed those recommendations but unfortunately the problem is still unresolved.

Now, I can’t say for absolute certain that my issue is caused by Windows 10 but the timing is very coincidental. I’ve investigated everything, from the hardware itself to the network, router, etc and nothing sticks out. Further, I can’t say that I’ve ever had an issue like this with the WD drive in 3-4 years, it only just occurred. Additionally, all (5) desktop PC’s in the office are of varying make/model’s and all are experiencing the slowness.

Has anyone else had a similiar issue? Any suggestions?

Hello and welcome to the WD community.

I have not tried this, but lets see if another user can share some tips and information on this matter.

I’m having the same problem after installing another modern WD USB drive. How exactly did you remove the driver for the NAS since the drive doesn’t show in the device list? Thank you!