Well... been leaving this thread alone a little longer than I meant to. It's been an insane week.
So, here's the situation now. As I mentioned, Avast and Malwarebytes both gave up before being able to finish scanning the H drive (Avast pronounced itself done, but clearly hadn't actually scanned the drive; MBAM just froze). Windows defrag and disk error-checking suffered similar fates. Puran, however... well, I'm not sure HOW to characterize it's performance. It hasn't given up, so that's good. Note "hasn't" instead of "didn't": yes, it's STILL GOING.
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/3292/puranhdrivedefrag.jpgThat screenshot was taken ten minutes ago. It's been on "1%" on the "Filling Gaps" process for
days. But it's not frozen; it IS moving from one file to the next, continuing to work... it's just doing it at a legendarily slow pace.
I had Puran defrag the C drive first, just to test it out. It finished the entire thing in a reasonable amount of time, a few hours as I recall. So then I pointed it at H and started it up again. The initial defragging process on H took a lot longer; almost three days. But that's NOTHING compared to this "Filling Gaps" process.
So... what should I do? Surely, the next step cannot be to simply wait this out. At this pace, it could take literally months to finish unless it speeds up at some point. Clearly, something is SERIOUSLY wrong with this drive... but what? Is there something else I can do? Should I let Puran continue, or just stop it since this eternal scan probably isn't going to be worth anything? Is there something I can do to specifically check for physical damage to the drive?
Kind of at a bit of a loss here...
One other question: just out of curiosity, and because through all of this I'd like to increase my own level of expertise when it comes to troubleshooting this stuff: Zyndstoff, how exactly DID you determine that my drive doesn't use the 4k-format? I couldn't find anything about it on the WD site (actually, I couldn't find my drive at all, by the exact model number; I seem to recall that at the time I bought it, the same thing happened. The model number on mine seems to just be the "retail store" version of the one on their site, since they are the same spec wise, as you mentioned).