I owned a 500GB Western Digital My Passport Essential which recently died after becoming very slow, making strange noises etc (common hard drive death sounds) So I RMA'd it to WD. They sent me a replacement just a couple weeks ago and it ran great. I benchmarked it at 30Mb/s great speed but suddenly it is behaving like USB 1.1. I own an Acer Extensa 4420-5963 which only comes with USB 2.0 not 1.1 there is no reason this drive should now be transferring at speeds of 1.5Mb/s but it is. I've format the drive, deleted the partitions, recreated partitions, format again, chkdsk, tried it on another computer but no matter what I do the data access is erratic and slow. There are no data read or write errors at all, the SMART tech says everything is okay. I tried a 2GB flash drive and it gets a consistent 28Mb/s transfer speed why is my WD My Passport Essential external USB 2.0 drive behaving like a USB 1.1 drive suddenly? I can't find the drive at fault, it's a brand new replacement. The USB drivers aren't at fault since the 2GB flash can read and write perfect speeds.

"Epic_Geek" wrote in message news:c52fa1e9-4f4a-46e2-9e78-18cedf8884e0... I owned a 500GB Western Digital My Passport Essential which recently died after becoming very slow, making strange noises etc (common hard drive death sounds) So I RMA'd it to WD. They sent me a replacement just a couple weeks ago and it ran great. I benchmarked it at 30Mb/s great speed but suddenly it is behaving like USB 1.1. I own an Acer Extensa 4420-5963 which only comes with USB 2.0 not 1.1 there is no reason this drive should now be transferring at speeds of 1.5Mb/s but it is. I've format the drive, deleted the partitions, recreated partitions, format again, chkdsk, tried it on another computer but no matter what I do the data access is erratic and slow. There are no data read or write errors at all, the SMART tech says everything is okay. I tried a 2GB flash drive and it gets a consistent 28Mb/s transfer speed why is my WD My Passport Essential external USB 2.0 drive behaving like a USB 1.1 drive suddenly? I can't find the drive at fault, it's a brand new replacement. The USB drivers aren't at fault since the 2GB flash can read and write perfect speeds. Have you checked the cable? Noel Paton | Nil Carborundum Illegitemi | CrashFixPC | The Three-toed Sloth

What is the file system on the WD external disk? Even if the external disk supports high speed USB 2.0 speeds, if the file system is FAT32 or older, you will be get limited data transfer speeds. Please check if the file system on the disk is NTFS - this offers the best performance. If you don't have a lot of data on the disk, save it else where and format the disk with NTFS file system. You should see a significant improvement in performance. If the format is NTFS but still you are experiencing slow speeds, then it may be because you are transferring a large number of files (size per file is not large, the number of files are large. Example 2000 files totaling to 3GB or so). I've noticed that this is normal behavior. Whereas if the total size is more but number of files is less, the transfer happens at a good speed. Please revert back here if this post does not address your query. Hope it helps! Kunal D Mehta - a Windows Server Enthusiast | I'm on facebook.com/serverbaba | RIP Steve Jobs