Help needed: slow external hard drive
I've got a 2TB Toshiba drive (formatted as NTFS) that has become very slow and I was wondering if anyone here as any ideas what the problem could be and how I could fix it. All the data I'd need off the drive is backed up, but I would at least like a drive to put it back on to!
In short, it became slow after I had to force power-off the system it was connected to (Pop OS installed on another external drive which I unplugged by mistake) and I haven't bothered to try to fix it in the six months since.
I've tested it on Pop and it takes about 10-20 minutes to mount, and 2 minutes to unmount and safely remove. The data itself seems fine but performance is slow, accessing a 20MB image takes several seconds and selecting the drive in GNOME Disks caused it to freeze.
The drive sounded louder than normal, especially after plugging in.
On Windows, the drive was recognised and browsable immediately, but browsing through folders was very slow - opening some folders causes Windows Explorer to freeze for a while. Some of my double-clicks were mis-recognised as click-to-rename, which took several seconds to activate and during which time Task Manager reported the average response time between 5000 and 11000 ms.
Attempting to load an audio file resulted in lots of buffering. Task Manager reports an active time of 100% (even when not loading files or folders) and the activity never exceeded 100 KB/s (and doesn't sustain it for more than a second). Ejecting the drive takes forever - after ejecting it using the tray icon, the tray icon is not removed (even though there are no other drives connected or listed) and the active time is still 100% with the indicator LED blinking non-stop. The system did not enter sleep right away after me asking it to either.
All of that to say, does anyone know what the issue could be, or how I could find and fix it? Thanks!
Edit: fixed and normal functionality restored (at least so I can check the drive a bit easier) using Scan & Repair in Windows (see my comment).
That suggests the drive has physical issues, and is getting to the end of its life. You were wise to back up the data.
Next step (if my assumption is true) is to run some drive tests which will test for bad sectors, seek failures, and stuff like that. A basic web search should reveal some common tools used to do this. Once you've verified that physical failure is truly the problem, then you have to decide whether it's worth trying to keep using that drive or not. For example, you could use it as temporary storage for files that you don't really care about, because once a drive gets in that state, it gets worse as time passes, and you increase the risk of not being able to read files back off of it (some bytes will be corrupt or missing, or take too long to read off the disk).
One other thing: If a drive is not that damaged yet, with only a few bad sectors, the drive can be told to avoid the bad sectors, and still give some more months of service. The same drive checking tools I mention above can be used to set this up on the drive.
Thanks for reading all that, I ran the scan and check for errors tool in Windows (right click drive > Proporties > Tools > Check). It took a while (scan didn't work, I needed to use scan and repair) but the logs show it deleted some corrupt attribute records. Since then the performance and active time have been back to normal. That gives me chance to check if the drive itself is actually okay and run a few more checks, at least.
Lots of this:
I didn't have the thought it might be a physical problem since it's only a year old. Obviously it still could be, at least this fix will let me check it a bit easier.
Hard drives have a bathtub failure curve. Many of them die very quickly and then the rest fail after years of constant use.
Did a SMART report, it says that there are no reallocated sectors or any sectors that need reallocation (so in theory none of the sectors have failed) but there are some read errors, so I'll keep an eye on it... I've also made sure my backups are actually working which I probably should have done a while ago!
It seems pretty suspicious that SMART is reporting nothing wrong. Ensure that that is not just the results of a very old SMART test run, as opposed to from a recent SMART test run that you just ran.
Last time I had drive issues, a scan with CrystalDiskInfo was recommended to me (yes, I know it the site with an anime header looks questionable). It provides a lot of information, including more detailed SMART data than I was able to find with other tools.
I agree, this sounds like a dying drive.
It's probably dying ; the symptom you describe is very similar to what happened to one of my desktop's internal drive. Fortunately hard drive are cheap now.