West Digital "My Passport" can only connect through USB. Running extremely slow.

[Setlist]

I have a couple of West Digital "My Passport" external drives. The only way to connect is through USB. I took the drive out of the case and it has a proprietary connection that connects the drive directly to usb with power. After looking online I see many reports that these drives are basically unrecoverable. The drive does show up when connected to a computer but it is unreadable.

I have been running spinrite 6.1 for about a week now and it's still at 0.00%. It occasionally beeps as it goes into dynastat mode so I assume it's find errors.

My question however is, Spinrite is running extremely slow. Not the recovery part, but the actual interface of spinrite. It could take 10 minutes to respond to a command (hitting the space-bar to change the diagnostic screen for example). I have ran spinrite on the same computer with other drives and haven't had this issue. I suspected it was the drive, but then I thought, why would spinrite's inteface be slow just because the drive is slow?

Anyway, just wondering if anyone else has had this issue and can put a little light on the issue?

 

[PHolder]

At least part of the issue is likely the USB-ness of the connection. More specifically, SpinRite is solely relying on your machine's BIOS to support the USB. If it's running that slow, it's probably likely that there are a LOT of time outs going on, and little that is actually very useful. I would interrupt SpinRite and check the logs. If it's not actually succeeding at doing any recovery, you could speed it up significantly by turning the recovery off, but it will probably just blank the portions of the drive with errors. (It's probably already doing that anyway, just much slower.)

TL;DR: You can use the command line to turn off recovery but you WILL lose data. The command line is on the FAQ on the site (https://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm) and the one you want in this case is DYNASTAT 0

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[DanR]

My question however is, Spinrite is running extremely slow. Not the recovery part, but the actual interface of spinrite. It could take 10 minutes to respond to a command (hitting the space-bar to change the diagnostic screen for example). I have ran spinrite on the same computer with other drives and haven't had this issue. I suspected it was the drive, but then I thought, why would spinrite's inteface be slow just because the drive is slow?

I suspect you are using a USB keyboard? If that is using the same controller as the passport drive being scanned drive then the USB controller will be too busy with SpinRite's data I/O activity to service keyboard interrupts in a timely fashion. Hence the keyboard becomes unresponsive. If there is more than one USB controller, simply move the keyboard to a different USB controller.

If there are USB ports on the L and R sides of the computer, they will typically be on different USB controllers. If there are USB ports on the F and R panels they will typically be on different USB controllers.