WD20EARS-00MVWB0 slowed itself down to crawl, any idea?

[andreev]

Hi,

I used to have this WD drive with non-essential information in an HDD enclosure, but at some point I noticed that it doesn't mount anymore (I'm running Ubuntu Linux). After some investigation I realised that the drive is not (totally) dead, but the read speed dropped to crawl and the VFS layer times out reading FAT32 tables. There are no I/O errors in dmesg or anything like that. Actually no relevant information in dmesg at all apart from standard USB stack messages when you plug-in a device. The drive is quiet and is not making noises that I'd be alerted about.

I'm now mirroring the drive with ddrescue to another one from the same series, but the average read speed is like 70 kilobytes per second. It seems that at this rate I will finish mirroring next year.

Does anyone have an idea of what's going on? Is there anything I can do about it myself? I imagine that professional recovery might cost more than the data

Thanks!

[BlackST]

Ask someone with an HW imager that can do the job for you (clone to another disk). Safer and effective if the drive has some problems / is starting having problems but it it not toast yet.
Otherwise have it diagnosed.
If you want some recommendation for professionals in your area or near you who have the necessary gear (it should be of little cost at this stage) let me know.
I'm In Italy so it will be too far.

[andreev]

Not sure why my previous message was moderated, it didn't have any links. I'll be brief: please do recommend some. Thanks!

[loki]

Like others here I have a Deepspar Disk Imager (hardware imager) & PC3000 UDMA.
Im based in the UK if sending it is not an issue?

Loki

[andreev]

pcrecovery, sorry, I'm not allowed to reply to private messages. Yes, testing heads to confirm the issue is logical, but I don't have the qualification. I checked your website and sadly you are in US, it's complicated, expensive and slow to post there :-/

loki, thanks for the offer.

I will update my boss with the info and see if he is OK with sending the drive away and paying the recovery or if he would like us to re-generate the data. Initially I was hoping that there might be some special street magic I can try myself first...

[poehere]

I can give you a person in Austria if you want to send to him. Let us know and we will put you in touch with him there.

[BlackST]

I was thinking about the same person