Studio Edition II drive performing very very slowly

[steffi]

Seems it just won’t complete the Standard Test in QuickBench. I think there’s something very very wrong here.

All other drives on my system probably complete the Standard Test in QuickBench Speedtools Utilities.

I’m using the drive on a FW800 connection.

It is also slow when I change FW800 cables and using a USB 2.0 connection.

It’s ridiculously slow.

[petriojala]

I have a very similar problem.  I purchased a 2T WD My Book Studio Edition II back in January and it has been working fine until a few weeks ago.   Well, fine with USB2, FW800 is a bit flaky but works better without the WD Drive Manager installed.

About two weeks ago the drive turned into very slow.  We used it to store music in our living room and it’s so slow that playing music with iTunes skips.  That’s pretty rare…  Using speed tests I figured the performance is now something like 1/20th what it used to be.  The drive is just 50% full (2T striped).   Drive Manager reports drive status OK.

Looking at iStats Menus Disk Activity graphs, the drive traffic peaks and goes to 0 – if it was working properly, it would flat at full speed.  It seems like the drive(s) are doing something (head parking?) between each small piece of data transferred.

I’ve been copying files from the drive to another for about four days now and the final 10 Gb are left – and will take about 40 minutes to finish.  Both USB2 and FW800 are the same, and it’s the same with both Mac Mini and iMac.

I’ve got an open case with the support but nothing useful yet.  If I don’t get more than “please check the power plug” -type of advice, I’ll go and warranty replace the thing next week – with a note that I would prefer to receive another type of 2T drive instead.