Very slow writing to external USB drive

[Quattro Pete]

I've had this 500GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA drive installed in an external USB case for about a year. It always worked very well and fast. Suddenly today, trying to save anything on this drive takes 10x longer than it used it. However, copying from this drive to my local PC is still fast.

I tried running WD DataLifeguard Diagnostics on it plus the basic Windows "scan this drive for errors" test - it came up with nothing alarming.

What could this be? Are there any other HD utilities that would test an external USB drive? Many of them don't.

I tried plugging it into a different USB port, but the result is the same.

 

[mfisher1967]

Could the USB cable be bad? Is the drive nearly full? Also, check the device manager in the control panel to see if anything looks fishy there.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Well, this issue got resolved and I even posted the resolution, but then the board crashed and we lost all the responses in this thread.

Anyway, it turned out my external enclosure was on its way out. I got a new enclosure and I'm back in business. Prior to that, I did try a different USB cable though just to make sure it's not something simple.