I have been using WD My Passport Essential 500GB for past 4 months to keep my media files and photographs. It used to instantly get detected.
Now, it takes ages to detect and even after it gets detected, i cant copy or play any movies or view photographs of the drive as the speed is too slow.
I have ran the Windows Errpr checking and CHKDSK also, and to complete these tests Windows took ages but the speed hasnt improved.
I have upgraded the firmware of the drive as well, but nothing has improved.
i have the same problem with the essential se 1tb, it starts very fast, at the next week the speed slows a lot, i dont know what happen, i contacted to the support and my problem jump to EUROPE? O.o!
i have also a very slow 500GB passport essential and just sent support a question to see if i can get it replaced / solved… it takes almost an entire minute to detect the drive and seems to stall during large file transfers… it shows about 1.83mb/sec.
I’m not very new to these external drives, and this by far is the slowest i’ve seen. It is sad because I would rather use my faster 120GB passport than the slow 500GB for file transfering …