As a private user, I am looking for some help 
Well....as a happy citizen I bought a 2TB WD Elements USB 3.0 drive some time ago. All was good and I got about 1.8TB data on to it including 1TB of Music. All of a sudden (a week back) it decided to just become very slow. And then SMART started saying the drive is failing. So of course I am in panic mode.
1. I can connect to the computer, it is recognized, mounts and I can navigate all the directories, and even read small text and large excel files fine. These are the only files I tried to read becuse they are small sizes. So one would think its OK....but apparently not.
2. I then tried copying off the files from the disk to another drive. This is when it choked. File copying was running at miserable speeds of 30 kB/s or so, so getting all the stuff off of there was a year long project!!
(30 kB/s is just my default for saying it is around that speed for the points I list below)
3. Running chkdsk /f /r /x gave same slow results on Phase 4.
4. So I just ran simple chkdsk and it was able to finish, with reporting 4 kB bad clusters/sectors.
**Question: Is that a lot?
---No file errors reported -- at least nothing in the report.
--Trying to use chkdsk to repair the sectors it was no go because it would take ages.
--It seems that the drive "defaults" to this speed at the start of the drive/data itself so does that mean bad sectors are at the start?
3. So after searching for a week and trying various softwares to clone off the drive, which also were reading miserably slow, I pulled out dd_rescue etc. and TL;DR I ended up with HDDsuperclone that I never knew existed.
-- Totally new to HDDsuperclone
---In default mode (whatever the program loads up) the rate was still 30 kB/s
---HDDsuperclone in "Extended Analyze" mode said 100% good data, 0% bad sectors but 67% slow. OF course, it has not analyzed the whole drive so it could be missing bad sectors?
---Fooling around with skip rate, and those related parameters didn't help.
4. So then went hunting on Google and came across a video on "USB direct mode".
---Now things changed !
--- Running in USB direct mode, I just bumped to MAX cluster size
--- Now I am getting reads of average 11 MB/s. What the heck?
*** BIG QUESTION: Is it COPYING any data like this? From reading it looks like not all drives can do USB direct.
--- Should I continue of am I just scanning the drive???
Other questions:
a. It looks like it is copying to an image file. I will have ~ 2TB file on a 4TB hard drive. How will I mount and recover data? Totally clueless here.
b. I had 2 x 1TB partitions on the old drive. What will the image look like? Is it an exact clone?
c. Any tips on recovering the image, IF it even contains data (!!) would be greatly appreciated
d. Is there an easy software fix for the famous WD "slow disk" firmware bug -- I just found about that also. I am assuming that may be the problem?
THANKS FOR READING !! And all help is greatly appreciated.
Well....as a happy citizen I bought a 2TB WD Elements USB 3.0 drive some time ago. All was good and I got about 1.8TB data on to it including 1TB of Music. All of a sudden (a week back) it decided to just become very slow. And then SMART started saying the drive is failing. So of course I am in panic mode.
1. I can connect to the computer, it is recognized, mounts and I can navigate all the directories, and even read small text and large excel files fine. These are the only files I tried to read becuse they are small sizes. So one would think its OK....but apparently not.
2. I then tried copying off the files from the disk to another drive. This is when it choked. File copying was running at miserable speeds of 30 kB/s or so, so getting all the stuff off of there was a year long project!!
(30 kB/s is just my default for saying it is around that speed for the points I list below)
3. Running chkdsk /f /r /x gave same slow results on Phase 4.
4. So I just ran simple chkdsk and it was able to finish, with reporting 4 kB bad clusters/sectors.
**Question: Is that a lot?
---No file errors reported -- at least nothing in the report.
--Trying to use chkdsk to repair the sectors it was no go because it would take ages.
--It seems that the drive "defaults" to this speed at the start of the drive/data itself so does that mean bad sectors are at the start?
3. So after searching for a week and trying various softwares to clone off the drive, which also were reading miserably slow, I pulled out dd_rescue etc. and TL;DR I ended up with HDDsuperclone that I never knew existed.
-- Totally new to HDDsuperclone
---In default mode (whatever the program loads up) the rate was still 30 kB/s
---HDDsuperclone in "Extended Analyze" mode said 100% good data, 0% bad sectors but 67% slow. OF course, it has not analyzed the whole drive so it could be missing bad sectors?
---Fooling around with skip rate, and those related parameters didn't help.
4. So then went hunting on Google and came across a video on "USB direct mode".
---Now things changed !
--- Running in USB direct mode, I just bumped to MAX cluster size
--- Now I am getting reads of average 11 MB/s. What the heck?
*** BIG QUESTION: Is it COPYING any data like this? From reading it looks like not all drives can do USB direct.
--- Should I continue of am I just scanning the drive???
Other questions:
a. It looks like it is copying to an image file. I will have ~ 2TB file on a 4TB hard drive. How will I mount and recover data? Totally clueless here.
b. I had 2 x 1TB partitions on the old drive. What will the image look like? Is it an exact clone?
c. Any tips on recovering the image, IF it even contains data (!!) would be greatly appreciated
d. Is there an easy software fix for the famous WD "slow disk" firmware bug -- I just found about that also. I am assuming that may be the problem?
THANKS FOR READING !! And all help is greatly appreciated.
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