Transfer speed ridiculously slow

Hey guys! I have a My Book Essential 1Tb external HDD (4 months old). Just recently it has dropped its transfer speed significantly! HD Tune reports a max speed of 820kb/s. Also checked for surface errors and it found a couple bad sectors (Not sure about the reliability HD Tune). Foolishly I opened the case to see if it was physically damaged, now my warranty is void:-(. A disk defrag utility shows that almost 76% of the files on the drive are fragmented… Defraggin them would take about 98 day!!! I also tried the windows chkdsk utility and this took about 2 days to complete, but nothing has been fixed! I am afraid to format the drive because i am not sure this would fix the issue. Is there any other utility i could use to repair the drive? Please help.

Hi there! Well… You just used the tools that I use and work for me, if the files are in another place then I would suggest you to write zeroes (Low level format that It’s going to kill all to the drive, even the file system) to try to repair the bad sectors… if it doesn’t work then the drive may just be worned out…

Ok cool thanks, i’ll do that. How long do you think it will take for the format to complete… Coz i noticed that manually deleting (permanently) files in the drive takes ages!!! And oh, what specific tool did you use to fix your hard drive?

Your file system is corrupted. Try to recover your drive using HDD Regenerator 2011 or TestDisk utility.

Tried using Test Disk… It found errors on my boot sectors, couldn’t fix them though. Will try Hdd regenerator and let you know how it goes. Thank you! If that doesnt work i will have no choice but to format:-(

HDD Regenerator was runnin too slowly… It would take a week for the scan to complete, cancelled it. Formatted but to no avail. Not even a low level format worked… Now it has a write speed of about 1kb/s!!! thank you all for your help, will be discarding of the drive soon.