External Hard Drive - Slow

Hey everyone,

I'm having some serious issue with my External Hard Drive. It's a Western Digital 1TB 2.5" USB 2.0 Drive connected to a Feb. 2012 15" Macbook Pro running Lion.

It always worked fine, however recently its taking extra long to recognize the drive as well as open folders and files. I can't play videos directly off it anymore because they take forever to load, and then play as if they're buffering online. Even iTunes music which is all saved on the drive often takes 10-20 seconds to start playing.

File transfer is sporatic at best. A 1.29 GB file takes a minute or two to begin transferring, and then immediately jumps to 8mb transferred. After waiting another 30 seconds or so it jumps to 25.2 MB. The changes dont occur in any discernable pattern, and the entire file transfer process seems to be slowed by it.

What can i do to improve the drive's performance? Keep in mind its almost half full, and to try and copy all the data to my computer would A) Take forever B) Take up all the remaining space on my internal drive, and may not even fit.

Thanks!

Fixed it

Alright, someone riddle me this?

So, i switched the port the External was connected to - boom problem solved.

My other usb port works fine, i can connect usb devices to it and transfer fine. Its only this external drive...

Did you have it connected to a hub on that other port by chance? If so, note that the bandwidth of the single port is split evenly amongst devices connected to it.