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It started with watching movies on the HD and they buffered which makes no sense for local files. I decided to move everything off the drive just in case and it copies at 100Mb/s for hundreds of gigs then drops to 5Kb/s and hangs... It eventually does copy if I leave it over days, but clearly there are "dark spots" on the drive based on how certain files or folders copy like crap while others are fine. I've run HD tune, Seatools, and Checkdisk. There are no bad sectors, but even the scans go to crap in parts when it hits the "dark spots".

I have the drive empty and removed the partition in Windows. I recreated and long formatted the drive, but it still seems to be a problem. Is the drive just screwed or is there a way around this. I'm doing a Seatools Long Generic test right now, but of course it will take most of the day or until tomorrow to finish.

The weird thing is that I have two hard drives that both exhibit this problem at the same time which was almost immediately after I changed to a generic PSU. I ahave a really nice Corsair PSU now (just bought it to make sure it wasn't the issue), but the timing was weird.

Any help or ideas are appreciated. I've considered using Sardu or an Ubuntu boot disk to hit the drives harder with other tools and less Windows involvement, but am I wasting my time? Are the drives just completely toast? Bad sectors I understand, but this weird "no mans land" issue with the drives is completely new to me.

It's an internal hard drive about 3Gb in size. Western Digital. I've already tried switching cables and SATA ports.

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  • I'd advise you to try using a different USB cable and even try it on another computer, @not_a_generic_user! It's possible that the USB cable itself is faulty, thus not supplying the drive with enough power to maintain the regular transfer speed. You should also consider updating the USB hub controller drivers from the computer/motherboard hardware manufacturer's website, rather than letting Windows Updates take care of them. To prevent any potential data loss, I'd strongly recommend you to keep your data stored on, at least, two different storage devices. Hope it helps. Good luck! Feb 12, 2016 at 10:16
  • SuperSoph, the drive is internal and I already tried different cables and ports. It's definitely the drive. DavidPostill, it has smart errors, but so did my other one and I was able to get it working again as far as I can tell. I would assume just a bad hard drive, but both went "bad" at the same time so I can't help but feel there's something else wrong here. Feb 12, 2016 at 15:03
  • If the HDDs are showing SMART errors, I'd strongly advise you to backup your data elsewhere before proceeding with the troubleshooting! If you can share the SMART attributes' values, that'd be very helpful. It's possible that changing the PSU had a bad influence on the drives, so I'd suggest you try testing them in another system. Keep us posted with the troubleshooting & Good luck! Feb 15, 2016 at 11:26

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