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Sluggish Hard Drive
I have a hard drive that is very slow to respond. When renaming a file, it takes longer than usual and when I open the directory to see all the folders it also takes time.
Is this a sign of a hard drive going bad?
Roger Bansemer
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8 Replies
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You probably need to Defragment it.
Steve Rhoden
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It could also be a case of the drive being close to its capacity.
In either case, hard drives are very cheap these days so buy another one, just in case, and back this one up before doing anything to it. -
Are there thousands of files in a single directory? Sometimes the overhead of the operating system maintaining the directory entries for a large directory can cause this type of sluggishness. That is usually coupled with fragmentation of the files (scattered throughout the drive rather than organized neatly in contiguous sections).
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Also, your antivirus software can scan files in the background…
Vegasaur.com – Plugins for Sony Vegas Pro
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You could run Process Explorer. R-click on a column header, choose Select Columns. Dialog will appear:
ProcessExplorer_IOReadsWrites.jpg
On the Process Performance tab, enable I/O Reads and I/O Writes.
You can now sort by these columns in main view and thus see which apps are causing the most I/O traffic. Hopefully, they’re not problematic.
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Question is, has it become slow suddenly, over a period of time, or has always been slow. Is it a data drive or your main system drive?
A near capacity drive will slow down especially if fragmentation is bad as mentioned in previous posts.
Is it a “Green” drive… they can go off for a low-power snooze when not accessed for a while.
A bit of Googling will find programs that test your HD’s efficiency – but make sure it is from a reputable software company or HD maker.
Windows 7 Pro64, 16GB RAM, SSD boot drive, GTX 570 Graphics, Vegas Pro 12
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Thanks everyone for all the tips on the questionable hard drive.
It’s not very full so that isn’t an issue. It’s be defragmented also. In fact Windows seems to keep them defragmented all the time.
I can’t really say if it’s been over time that it’s acting very slow but it just doesn’t seem to access files as quickly as my other drives.
I’ve never heard of the “indexing”. What is that?
I’ll also check out the “performance tab”Roger Bansemer
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