External WD my book HD losing trasfer rate to zero

[shreeit]

I have WD My book 4tb external HD for few years. Suddenly it started losing transfer rate and down to 0. I have other WD drive, no issue. I tried on different laptop same problem. Transfer start with good rate than suddenly started going down.

 

[corkyg]

When your test shows zero transfer rate, can data be copied or read in the real world? My question is to help isolate the problem. Is it the drive or what ever you are testing with?

 

[Yakk]

What does the HD SMART data say?

 

[Elixer]

Run CrystalDiskInfo (free) and see what it says about the drive.
Could be the drive, the cable, the controller...

 

[Valantar]

CrystalDiskInfo is a good idea. I had an old 2TB WD Green internal hard drive that for all intents and purposes looked okay, but transfer speeds regularly dropped to the tens of kb/s range. Turned out the drive was toast, with a bunch of reallocated sectors and so on.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, hope that you have backups, it's not a good sign when transfer rates tank to zero, over a USB3.0 connection. At least, for longer than just momentarily. (I've had it happen on cheaper flash drives, where the flash drive controller is evidently looking for places to put new data on during a transfer, but HDDs shouldn't really do that.)