WD Essential read speed is super slow all of a sudden - Help!!

Hi,

I got the 1TB model of this...

My Book Essential Edition 3 TB Hard Drives ( WDBACW0030HBK )

...about 4 months ago. One day, out of nowhere, it started to take 2 minutes to mount, then another 2 to display the folder contents, then several minutes more to be able to open files.

And when I tried to copy a file to another drive, it did it incredibly slow.

The drive is not making any strange sounds and I verified with Disk Utility with no errors, but something is obviously wrong. Any ideas/solutions?

Thanks

If the drive is taking 2 minutes to mount, there's something wrong. Could be getting ready to fail. The first thing I would do is remove all your essential data from the drive or at least try to back it up to another. Trying to extract data from a failed 1 TB drive could get expensive even with using specialized software.

Once you get your data removed from the drive, contact WD support and ask them for a RMA. Or if you recently purchased it, take it back and exchange it for another.