Videos lags on WD My Passport drive

[Bushur]

I bought WD My Passport driver couple of weeks ago (its not even a month old yet). It works fine but am facing few problems with my videos saved on the drive. Whether its downloaded or moved from my camcorder, whenever am playing any of the video, it lags. And if i play the same video directly from my smartphone or camcorder, it works fine. What could be the problem ?

Other problems i noticed with this drive is am getting very slow speed while copying those media files from any external drive to WD or vice versa. Even defragmenter is not able to fix it because my drive wont allow it to complete the defragmentation. What else can i do to fix it ? Please help.

[Amadou]

Well there is the problem with your WD drive itself. Lets tryout some troubleshoot to get it fixed. First you have to download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics utility to run a test, at the moment there is only Windows version of the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics utility so the people those who have the Mac OS X will have to connect the drive to the Windows machine , this application can do the drive identification, diagnostics, and repairs

• Download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics in to the machine , it will be in Zip format so you might need the WinZip to extract the application
• Now click on the windlg.exe it will run , remember that you might need the administrator excess to application to be install so do the need full when prompt for that
• Now it will be showing the two windows on the main program screen top and bottom , on the top it will show the each drive in the computer on that with all the detail about it . and on the bottom the partition information to selected drive will showed
• Click the drive to test the on the top windows , the DLGDIAG choose the Option that displayed here is some that you will see
  
  • The QUICK TEST that will start the SMART drive quick self-test to get and confirm the and verify the Data Lifeguard information contain on the drive
  • Second will be the EXTENDED TEST that will start the Full Media Scan to detect bad sectors
  • Another will be the writes zeros that will have two option in it which would be Full Erase and Quick Erase.
  • And the last is the VIEW TEST RESULT for seeing the result
  
  
• Choos the second option and hit the Start button. After the test it will notify , remember this will take some time and that depends on the amount of data present in the drive
• Close the notification this will open the test results for the drive on the default web page

Thats it , this is all you have to do and in case the test goes well then you have to backup all of the files and format the drive and if the test fail then you might need to call the support to get it work or at least replacement if under warranty , hope this help

[Bushur]

Thats was a great tutorial friend, thanks for the same. I tried the steps exactly as yo have mentioned above and it worked. but as you said at the end that i need to format my drive, i tried to do the same but am unable to do so. System wont allow me to format the drive. Am not getting any error as well but the drive is not just showing up in the computer. What to do now?

[JErastus]

There is the built in utility in the Windows 7 operating system called Disk Management that can help you to format the drive. Just try out following steps and see if it works:

1. Go to the my computer and right-click, then go to the Manage.,
2. Now you will be have the windows that has two panes, that is the Computer Management window, on the left panel there will be Storage just click on Disk Management on there
3. This will show the result on the right panel, all the drive in the computer will be visible there . in the right lower panel where you see the drive of the computer , select the D My Passport drive for formatting , It normally has a black bar indicating unallocated space.
4. Some time the hard drive may not be detected in the PC with the windows 7. So in that situation you will have to initialize that is writing a signature to Drive. There will be the box of the drive, just left-click click and ok button , it will bring the wizard. Now Right-click on the red arrow and select the Initialize Disk, you need to do this If the disc the black bar and must say unallocated , now you can able to create partition and format it
5. Then most important thing is that you make sure that you have the full backup of the My Passport drive because once formatted you will be not able to get the data back again on that disk
6. Now right click on the blue bar and select the Delete Volume, this will show the window asking that do you really want to delete the partition. Say yes and the bar will be black now
7. Now hit the right button on the mouse in the black bar and the options menu will be appear , choose the New Simple Volume, this will take you to the well come wizard Left-click on Next to proceed to the next screen. Here the partition on the drive is set and Windows select the whole drive so left-click on Next. Select the drive letter that you want the drive to have Then click on Next.
8. Now you will be see the formation window,. Check it is set to the NTFS., keep the Allocation Unit Size as default , on the Volume Label field give the name that you want for the drive select the box Quick Format and hit the next button. the conformation windows will appear now that has all the option you have selected for your verification . Click next
9. Now it will say Formatting as it formats the drive on the main windows and after completing it will show the drive in blue and written Healthy

Just follow these steps and let me know the results.