My Passport, I think it crashed, transfer speeds

I have a WD My Passport that's a few years old, mostly sat in my bag(with the files I'm trying to transfer). Currently it takes about 8 minutes to transfer one picture at about 2.75 MB, and takes a lot longer to delete a picture. I currently have about 18,000 pictures on this HD and at that rate I'll be dead before I get them all transferred. At first I was trying to transfer from my windows to my mac, didn't really have any issues. Now the issues are from win to win or win to mac The files might be on my desk top(haven't fired up in about 2 years) so I'm going to check there and if they are I'll just format the HD and try again. But if that doesn't work I have no idea what to do, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

It could just be the interface board. Older Passports were actually just SATA drives with SATA to USB interface board attached. You'd have to open the case to find out. Unfortunately, the newer versions don't have SATA connectors, just USB.

There are a couple of things worth trying:

1. Start by using a different USB cable.

2. Then run chkdsk [drive] /f replacing "drive" with the appropriate drive letter (D, E, etc.). In other words if the drive is "D" the command is chkdsk D: /f

2. USB storage devices can be optimized for either quick removal/disconnect or for read/write performance. Sometimes if optimized for quick removal I have seen data transfer drastically impacted.

To optimize your USB drive for performance:
A. Right click on the USB drive and select properties
B. Select the Hardware tab
C. Under All Disk Drives, highlight your USB drive and select Properties
D. Select the Policies tab and select Optimize for performance.
E. Press OK to exit out, reboot and retest.

Note that when the drive is optimized for performance you'll need to use the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the task bar Usually lower right of your screen) to eject the drive. Otherwise you risk corrupting the data if writing to the drive is occurring while disconnecting the drive.

If you still have issues there is another possibility affecting drive performance

Go to

1. Control panel
2. Select System and Maintenance. In Windows 7 you can go directly to Administrative Tools and maybe do this as well in other versions

3. Select Administrative Tools
4. Select Services

Once the services program loads find the services called Background intelligent transfer service and stop it if running. Right click on the same service and click properties then change the start value to manual or disabled.

^ Great tips.

I will say that my friend had a 2Tb MyBook crash and it was lying around. I visited him and opened up to run some tests.
The SATA to USB was corrupted and possible fried. This was a detachable connection inside the plastic housing.
Swapping it out for another one (inside another of his external drives) allowed him to pull everything off of it to a newer 6Tb model.

This may not be an option in the Passports though, I have had three of them from 320GB up to 2Tb and its USB interface is soldered on.


OP: How full it is currently?
I had a 1Tb drive that I kept document movie and videos on that was 99% full. No important photo on that one.
One day it refused to buffer videos, playback was very choppy.

Fearing an imminent total crash I moved 20gb of critical data, I then delete the 20gb cleared my bin and it started behaving normally.
It had never been an issue before and I don't run any programs off of that external drive. There should be no cache adding to it at all.
Nothing was being written to it, only read.
Don't know if you have the same issue but with a spinning drive, you should keep 10% or more free always.
Even with larger terabyte + drives.

You could try fragmenting your drive as well. This is something that should be done perhaps every few months!