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Western Digital 1.5 Tb: Extremely slow transfer rates+format

Mar 21, 2011 3:44PM PDT

Hello CNET,

Thankyou for taking the time to help me with my issue.

I have an external hard drive as stated in the subject line.
It has worked perfectly, until it seems, I plugged it into my Macbook Pro. This external drive has only been exposed to a Windows PC and a PS3.

Watching .avi files through the media player on the PS3 was incredibly slow, and would act as though it was streaming with very slow download rates, constantly pausing.

File folders would open very slowly both through Mac OS and Windows, along with the PS3 media player.

I tried to transfer the files off, to format, but was getting maximum transfer speeds of 3mb/s and minimum speeds of 200 bytes/s. The maximum speed being rare, and limited to folders less than 1gb in size (weird).

Using Vista, I tried downloading a FAT32 GUI formatting .exe from this link: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Using 'quick format' which took only a few minutes, the drive still conatined all of the data which confused me.

Unticking the 'quick format' box, the format took a bit longer but yeilded the same results; data still on the disk.

I am currently using Vistas inbuilt formatting tool, via right-clicking the drive and formatting it NTFS with 'quick format' unticked.

It has been formatting for about 6 hours now, and the progress bar looks to be about 1% of the way through.

I am sure there is a better way to wipe this drive as I'm sure it is corrupted.

I appreciate your assistance in the matter,

Regards,

Finn

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