HELPP - Sluggish WD Elements Portable SE 500GB HDD

[deebee]

Pls Help!

My recently bought new "WD Elements Portable SE 500GB" is very sluggish.

Browsing thru folder takes time: usually anywhere from 2-5 seconds after double clicking.

The white LED on the HDD just keeps flashing for so long before the contents of the folder come up.

Trying to open files also is similar.

Am using it with a Win7 ultimate 32 bit on a notebook.

I re-formatted (NTFS) it on the same system & loaded up the media files -  again same problem.

Ran a check disk utility under Win 7 - it did not detect any errors after running thru the drive for a couple of hours.

I am in a fix now as to what to do????!!!!!!

Has this anything to do with the Advance Format thingy thats associated with the "Green" drives??

My older WD Elements Portable 500GB (first edition) has no such issues on the same system.

Would somebody from the board / WD please reply as to what is wrong with the drive?

And what is the fix for this issue.

Thanks so much again for delivering this marvel at such a price point. :-)

[shinhikari]

Thanks god... I think it was just me ... I have the same issue then... but mine is the 1TB version ... it's sluggish exactly like the above person described... my guess maybe it's because the HDD park too fast when it is left idle... so is there anyway I can fix this issue? maybe a firmware update of some sort?

[deebee]

Update!

I took back the drive and swapped it for a fresh brand new one. Same model: SE, 500GB.

The swap counter guy tested the brought in "supposedly faulty" drive & suggested that the drive was probably virus infected. Anyway he was kind enough to swap the drive for a fresh one without fuss. Athough he did say that if I compalined again of a slow drive, he would point blank assume that to be a case of virus infection.

Well I came back happy, plugged the drive in, loaded it up with the data, media & with a cautious note also scanned it for any virus infections - found none.

So what was the result like with the new drive?     Hmm....... same as the old one.

The drive is still sluggish when accessing any data for the first time or after it has not been used for (a few 10s of seconds). However it feels like butter when accessing data continuously without letting it wait over. Any folder / file.

This true when with it connected to a media player or a PC.

So my take is as what's been suggested above that the heads probably park early or the platters probabaly reduce the spin rate when the drive is not being accessed. And take a while to spin up to a rate to be usable (again my guess).

It really is very annoying to see the White LED flash, the screen in a kind'a hung condtion, while waiting to get a response from the HDD.

The first edition of the same drive, same capacity works without any issues ( I\ X fingers crossed :-)) in the same conditions with the same data inside.

In any case would say that a FW upgrade from WD is due for this very popular drive else I do not see myself buying this again or recommending it to somebody else.

WD help us get the confidence back in this product again.

[deebee]

Very similar experience as stated here:

WD Elements SE 2.5" 1Tb - Change Spin-down Time

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Other-Externals/WD-Elements-SE-2-5-quot-1Tb-Change-Spin-down-Time/td-p/6...

I believe this is not an isolated case & is widespread. We are in the same boat, together!

WD pls do something to correct this!

[jk956]

Same problem over here!

Please, let as many people as possible know our bad experience with Western Digital products!

This company definitely shows no respect for its customers!

I'm not buying anything from them again!

[unhappy1]

Same here, but with a 1.5 TB Elements.  Been using WD for 10 years, but will never buy another one again.  Had a 1 TB MyBook that was basically doing the same thing, but worse -- returned it for this one.  Not sure what this company is thinking.

[Biowizard]

I bought the 500Gb model last year, as an emergency backup after one of my desktop machines hard drives crashed, and I wanted to copy (and archive) the mirrored data on another machine to help me repopulate the replacement desktop machine hard drive.

I liked the simplicity of the WD Elements concept - a drive and a USB cable, and that's it. But all was not  plain sailing: first, I wanted to repartition the drive into several logical drives: this took an inordinately long time. Then I tried to format each (32Gb) partition as FAT32, for use from DOS & Win98, as well as later versions of Windows. Apart from taking literally many hours, I had a number of hard drive failure reports, forcing me to restart the process on several of the logical drives.

Even once connected to Windows Vista 64 or Windows 7 32,  the drive has a tendency to crash. Files being copied to it, sometimes copy only partially. When copying from it, it sometimes fails with errors like "sector not found", and so on. The crazy thing is, if I reboot and try again, those missing disk elements are there next time, but something else fails.

While copying an archive of around 7,500 high-res photos from the drive to two laptops of mine, one copied the drive perfectly; the other claimed to have copied perfectly - but on doing a subsequent check, about 12 of the photos contained corrupted data on the second machine (a Lenovo Thinkpad T43). Later checking the WD on the first laptop (HP/Compaq nc6320), all the photos were found to be correct! Trying the same test on the T43 just caused the WD to crash and report "Device Not Ready" or somesuch.

In other words, the WD drive was reporting "successful" reads while actually returning incorrect data

Sadly, all this means I simply cannot rely on my WD Elements drive for anything other than emergency transfers of unimportant data. It's in severe danger of becoming another item of landfill ...

Assuming this is not a physical hardware fault, WD BADLY NEED TO UPDATE THE FIRMWARE on this drive!

Brian

[Joe_S]

Do you have too many partitions?

Joe

[Biowizard]

What constitutes "too many"? I certainly DO have enough drive letters available, and have partitioned many other large hard disks, including those in my two workstation computers, in a similar way, with no issues!

Brian

[W_T_JFF]

On Windows try turning off the search indexing service.