I recently have had issues with my WD Passport Ultra 2tb external drive. I use the drive almost every day and the other night it randomly stopped working. It is very rarely recognized on any of my computers, but i got it to finally show up for once. I have used 1tb of the drive and its consisting of mostly videos, some images, songs and documents. I started to use Recuva to recover my files from the drive, and I noticed that my files were recovering ridiculously slow. It says that it will take 2+ days to transfer 65 gigabytes of video onto my laptop. I've realized that doing this on a laptop could be slowing it down, but there has to be something majorly long for 65 gigabytes to transfer that slowly. I unplug it from the laptop, it will be very difficult to have it recognized again on another computer. It seems that the files will start transferring and then plummet to 0 B/s. It will sit at 0 B/s for a second and then kick up and transfers slowly for a few seconds. This process repeats the entire time.I'm assuming some of the files have been corrupted due to an error saying that the files cant be transferred and trying to copy them to my desktop also states that the files can't be copied. I need some guidance or help with this because the items on my drive are very important to me, but i feel there should be another way to gather my data without it taking days to transfer or paying a company hundreds of dollars to gather my data for me. I will include some pictures of the errors and drive soon. Any support will be greatly appreciated!
sadly Nate one way drives can fail is expressed in extreme slowness.
there's the click of death, CRC errors, and just not powering up to name some others.
if the data is that important, and Recuva is moving forward albeit at a snails pace, I would be crossing my fingers and thinking "this is as good as it gets" and hoping against hope that 2+ days is better than nothing.
as you say, if you unplug the drive, it may never get recognised again, so you may have to continue down this path just in the likelihood it reaps some rewards.
sorry, I know that isn't much help in the actually recovery process...