A while ago I had a client come in with a 1TB WD Portable drive, one of those beloved integrated USB3 bridge units.

This one appeared to be suffering the possible issue where the data transfer rate drops off sharply within a short time / usage, down to little more than 64~100KB/sec.

I will say LOUD AND CLEAR right now that I'm more than aware that this method does put the drive at risk from hardware / head failure due to the number of power cycles it has to endure, however, it was opted to take this route rather than risk a bad firmware update and make the situation even worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHykaRl ... aDfC_63dFY

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The vast majority of WD drives that have the 'slow responding' problem won't work with this tool/method, but it seems you were lucky with this one

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It's the only one I've had with this behaviour yet (small town, 8,000 people, not a lot of diversity ).

What's the more typical behaviour ?

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Nice video and usb relay switch device

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I subscribed to your channel and look forward to more.
"My tweezers are complete shit" made me laugh out loud

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Ooh, that was in the WD MyBook encrypted controller video (P1 I believe), yes, don't know what I was doing trying to hold on to that part with those tweezers, bent out and about 0.5mm missing from the tip. Switched back to my Lindstrom ones in the next part

There's always odd jobs rolling in here, so I never quite know what I'll be dealing with.

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Would it be possible to use this link to direct people wanting to explore their options if they come by the video I posted, duly attributed of course?

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I have recently been contacted by someone else (not the person that started this post) that claims that this method has worked on a few (actually said many) drives in this condition. This person also understands that it is not an ideal method, and the repeated power cycles could kill the drive. This method was only used because the normal (free) WD slow fix could not be implemented. So I have been asked to implement the exit on slow option in HDDSuperClone, which I will in the next release (already tested and working).

But I am also working with this person to actually attempt to apply the slow fix on one of these drives (I believe a test drive that has already been recovered). The user has attempted using HDDSuperTool to apply the WD slow fix, but it fails. The drive is locked from performing the slow fix normally. I am currently working with the user to explore alternate methods to perform the slow fix, and it has already turned to swapping to a compatible sata board, but still working with a locked drive.

@Spildit, just so you know, my idea of being able to do it through USB on these locked drives appears to not be possible as the drive may not be visable to the OS in safe mode

So now to wait for all the posts where this should not be done, and only a pro with expensive pro tools should be attempting to recover data...

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We are in very different time zones so communication is slow, and I don't have all the information I need yet. There also seems to be an issue with getting the drive into safe mode and not be busy. Anyway, I am not going to take over this thread with this direction. The real point of posting was that others (at least one) have used the relay reset method to work around the slow issue when no other (affordable) option was available.

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I would just like to say that the latest version of HDDSuperClone has been released and has the option --exit-on-slow. So it should be able to be used in place of ddrescue for this if desired. Plus it will exit with a specific exit code for the condition.

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