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I have a WD Elements 8TB External Hard Drive that I purchased six months ago. During the past few weeks, it has been experiencing difficulties with its read/write speed, so I decided to investigate. (screenshot below)

My System:

  • Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
  • Intel Core i9 10900K 3.70GHz
  • Gigabyte Z590 AORUS MASTER
  • 64.0GB RAM
  • 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080

Pointers:

  • The speed issue only happens with READ. WRITE speeds are fine.
  • The drive has 40% free space.
  • Drive is set to "Better Performance"
  • The drive contains only video files, most of which are over 4 GB in size.
  • There are no VHDs or executable files on the drive. (so this question differs from Western Digital HDD Active Time 100 percent)
  • No background processes are running on this drive.
  • Checking with Procmon64, there do not appear to be any processes interfering.
  • CHKDSK and S.M.A.R.T are without issue.
  • Tested with Western Digital Dashboard
  • The drive is directly connected to a back port of the PC (not via a hub) USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C
  • The drive has already been defragmented.
  • The PC is free of all types of viruses, trojans, etc.
  • While copying files, RAM and CPU are 1%-3% in the performance window.

What Happens:

Every few minutes, the video pauses to buffer for a few minutes. Copying files begins with a decent reading speed of about 115MB\sec. Several minutes later, the "active time" goes to 100%, and the reading speed drops to 500K-1MB\sec. A few minutes later, it returns to normal reading speeds. This cycle repeats itself every few minutes.

My Thoughts:

I believe that the consistent pattern of increased speed followed by decreased speed is due to something accessing the disk rather than physical damage. However, I have no idea what it could be. If there was a physical issue, for instance, with the platter's motors, or a first read-block problem, I don't believe that it would go back to normal every few minutes, and certainly not in a consistent pattern.

My plan is to move everything to a second drive, and then I will try formatting the 8TB drive (full-not quick) and see if that helps.

Any thoughts?

enter image description here

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  • 1
    I would suggest testing on another PC. But try a different USB cable first just in case, they do go bad sometimes. Anyway if the same thing still happens then there is probably a problem with the HDD or the enclosure’s USB interface. There is also the possibility of power being a problem, I assume it has its own power adapter?
    – James P
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 14:57
  • "connected to a back port of the PC" - What type of port exactly? The performance of USB 3.2 Gen 1 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 is substanial.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:09
  • @Ramhound Sorry, I edited my post with the MB. It's USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C.
    – Zvi Twersky
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:21
  • 3
    You got a high read error rate, reallocated sectors and a high spin retry count. This drive is failing. Get a replacement ASAP
    – mashuptwice
    Commented Feb 25, 2022 at 15:53
  • 1
    High spin retry count could indicate power problems. The reallocated sector count would not explain why reads are slow (if the data is accurate there is only 1, not 17) and is not a guarantee that a drive is failing
    – James P
    Commented Feb 26, 2022 at 11:03

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