- Joined
- Nov 2, 2012
I've had a Western Digital Elements 2TB external hard drive for about 3 years now. It's served me well, and is a nice place to back up my photo portfolio, music collection, and some videos I've made. There's only about 175GB left on the drive.
Lately I've been experiencing horrendous slowdown on the drive. About 90% of the time, when I go into any folder on the drive, be it Root, a folder with 2 items in it, or a folder with 200, the green "loading bar" crawls across the top of my Windows Explorer screen (I use Windows 7 64-bit) at an extremely slow pace, and I can't access anything during this phase. Once the folder loads, if I try to click into a subfolder, I have to wait for the loading bar AGAIN. If I try to play a video, the video will stall, often as bad as once every 5 seconds, pausing for about 10 seconds every time. Even going up a level often means yet another long load time. Copying or deleting files to/from the device takes many times longer than it ought to. When trying to Recycle some filers earlier today, the progress bar got stuck for five minutes on the "discovering items" step. When this stall ended, it quickly enumerated and deleted all the files without issue. But for 5 minutes the drive seemed plain inaccessible.
As far as I can tell, nothing else is reading or writing to the drive as this happens.
Previously, the drive has behaved like this: the first time I tried looking at a folder on the drive each day, I'd have to wait a few seconds for the drive to "spin up", so to speak, and be ready to use. After that, I could go in and out of folders freely, until I left the drive alone for an hour or so, then the next time I wanted to use it I'd have to wait a few seconds again for that first folder. This always struck me as some type of "power saver" option. But now the drive seems to be constantly getting stuck in that dormant state. I can't even open a 20kb picture file without a lengthy wait and a frozen instance of Windows Photo Preview.
I ran the chkdsk tool with both boxes checked. I did it overnight since I knew it was going to take a while. I woke up twice after 5 and 6 hours (my PC is damn loud), and it had frozen on "3458 files processed" - the progress bar was maybe 10% of the way across the screen.
I've also used the Disk Checkup program to do some SMART self-tests, maybe 20 seconds into the short self-test it fails "due to the failure of a read element".
What's most interesting is this: if I reboot my PC and do nothing but read from the drive, it behaves fine. Opening a folder presents me with image/video previews and appropriate file icons, all loaded in effortlessly, even in folders with large numbers of files.
But writing one file to the drive seems to mess this all up. I was trying to save a file to G: from Firefox immediately upon reboot. The FF downloads window took forever to open up (it opened to the previous download location, which was in my G: drive). Suspecting the problem had returned, I went back to Windows explorer, and sure enough, the problem was back. Every folder/file load required a long wait time, and saving the image in Firefox meant the browser itself froze up during the write operation.
Is there any known cause for this, specifically errors triggered by writing to the drive? Is this some bizarre indexing error? I've tried turning it on and off, both in the drive's properties menu and in Windows' indexing options screen. No perceptible change. I've also tried changing the hardware preference from "Quick Removal" to "Better Performance", which only seemed to make the problem worse.
I'm out of ideas. Please help.
Lately I've been experiencing horrendous slowdown on the drive. About 90% of the time, when I go into any folder on the drive, be it Root, a folder with 2 items in it, or a folder with 200, the green "loading bar" crawls across the top of my Windows Explorer screen (I use Windows 7 64-bit) at an extremely slow pace, and I can't access anything during this phase. Once the folder loads, if I try to click into a subfolder, I have to wait for the loading bar AGAIN. If I try to play a video, the video will stall, often as bad as once every 5 seconds, pausing for about 10 seconds every time. Even going up a level often means yet another long load time. Copying or deleting files to/from the device takes many times longer than it ought to. When trying to Recycle some filers earlier today, the progress bar got stuck for five minutes on the "discovering items" step. When this stall ended, it quickly enumerated and deleted all the files without issue. But for 5 minutes the drive seemed plain inaccessible.
As far as I can tell, nothing else is reading or writing to the drive as this happens.
Previously, the drive has behaved like this: the first time I tried looking at a folder on the drive each day, I'd have to wait a few seconds for the drive to "spin up", so to speak, and be ready to use. After that, I could go in and out of folders freely, until I left the drive alone for an hour or so, then the next time I wanted to use it I'd have to wait a few seconds again for that first folder. This always struck me as some type of "power saver" option. But now the drive seems to be constantly getting stuck in that dormant state. I can't even open a 20kb picture file without a lengthy wait and a frozen instance of Windows Photo Preview.
I ran the chkdsk tool with both boxes checked. I did it overnight since I knew it was going to take a while. I woke up twice after 5 and 6 hours (my PC is damn loud), and it had frozen on "3458 files processed" - the progress bar was maybe 10% of the way across the screen.
I've also used the Disk Checkup program to do some SMART self-tests, maybe 20 seconds into the short self-test it fails "due to the failure of a read element".
What's most interesting is this: if I reboot my PC and do nothing but read from the drive, it behaves fine. Opening a folder presents me with image/video previews and appropriate file icons, all loaded in effortlessly, even in folders with large numbers of files.
But writing one file to the drive seems to mess this all up. I was trying to save a file to G: from Firefox immediately upon reboot. The FF downloads window took forever to open up (it opened to the previous download location, which was in my G: drive). Suspecting the problem had returned, I went back to Windows explorer, and sure enough, the problem was back. Every folder/file load required a long wait time, and saving the image in Firefox meant the browser itself froze up during the write operation.
Is there any known cause for this, specifically errors triggered by writing to the drive? Is this some bizarre indexing error? I've tried turning it on and off, both in the drive's properties menu and in Windows' indexing options screen. No perceptible change. I've also tried changing the hardware preference from "Quick Removal" to "Better Performance", which only seemed to make the problem worse.
I'm out of ideas. Please help.
