W7-64 Slow To Open Secondary Drive, USB Stick And Folders In Them

[jollyjohn]

G'day

Yes. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to open the secondary drive; the green progress bar on the address bar hardly moves, and if I open a folder inside the drive is also slow, then click on the back arrow to go back to the drive It's slow again.

I'm using W7 64. I just installed new 8GB ram thinking that was the problem. I have also re installed OS and done all the updates, and still haven't installed all my hard core software: Office, Cam/Cad and multimedia software.

Can anyone have a clue what it could be?

I also disable some services following the "Black Viper’s Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Service Configurations" Guide: http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-7-service-pack-1...onfigurations/

Could any of the disabled services be affecting the performance?

Thank you for reading.

John

[Slipster]

Could any of the disabled services be affecting the performance?

Depending upon which services you've tweaked, yes, they can. Are you saying that the problem persisted after a full Windows reinstall and update, but BEFORE applying the tweaks?

[jman98]

I've had this happen, but it's rare enough that I just shrugged it off as some kind of weird Windows bug. It rarely happens to my SATA attached drives. I have seen it happen mostly to USB attached devices. Sometimes it just sits and spins and it never opens the drive. I have found that attaching new disk drives my PC hasn't seen before is a lot more likely to cause this problem than anything else. This rarely happens to USB sticks on my server, but if it does happen, they are small enough that it doesn't take a long time to finish opening them. Hard disks can be painful though. What kind of connection does your secondary drive use?

To be honest with you I think I may have seen this happen a few times on my SATA drives, but I'm not 100% sure it has happened. I just think it did a few times. I suspect that mostly this is some kind of USB thing as I definitely remember it happening to new disk drives attached via USB. One of my friends needed me to get some files off some old hard drives he brought me and I definitely remember seeing this issue on his drives.

[jollyjohn]

Yes, the problem persisted after full clean installation and with nothing installed just the OS. I disallow indexing on the drive and it improved about 40%. Sometimes it opens to the click of the mouse other times it can take from 3 to 5minutes and keeps doing it as you hit the back arrow. This doesn't happen on W7 32 installed on the same HDD. Never had Boot problems nor mayor other problems.

The HDDs are SATA and the optical drive IDE, also very slow to detect disks.
Could it be a drivers problem?

Thanks again

John

[jman98]

Yeah, it could definitely be a drivers problem. Did you build this PC or buy it? The reason I am asking is that I had some different but really strange problems with disk drives in a PC build I did last year and it turned out that my problems were that my SATA cables were loose. I bought some SATA cables that had better connectors and it fixed my issues, but I've still seen that problem you mentioned happen sometimes when attaching new hard drives via USB. Definitely try to find the most recent drivers for your motherboard (if you built the PC yourself) or for the model from the manufacturer (if you bought it). I am running Win 7 64 bit too.

[jollyjohn]

I built it myself about a year ago.

[aedipuss]

i'd try a new sata cable first. then maybe a s.m.a.r.t. reading program if it's available for that drive like diskcheckup.

[orsetto]

Yep, checking and replacing SATA cables is always a good idea when HDDs start acting wonky. I recently phone coached a friend thru doing that on their PC when it flaked on them at 1am during an urgent project: shut down, open case, replug SATA a few times, reboot, and "voila" everything returned to normal.

That said, I have noticed the dead-slow folder opening glitch (s-l-o-w green bar at top of window) many times on a variety of new laptops that came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit pre-installed. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for it: it occurs with nearly empty HDDs, full HDDs, folders with just a few items, and folders with hundreds of items. It bothered me until I cross-referenced with other people and found it was common. I've seen it WAY more often on system boot drives than USB sticks or externals.

[chicken264]

I also have the problem with usb flash/portable hard drives on both of my windows 64 bit machines. I couldn't find a fix. I tried drivecleaner, which did not help.

Actually devices are detected and show up in attached devices, but disks are not shown may be disk drivers loads too slow. Looks like a bug in 64 bit windows as it never happened on 32 bit in my office. I use same flash/portable drives.

[jollyjohn]

Solved Problem:

I updated drivers, changed SATA data cables, scanned for malware, re-set services to default, the problem persisted with W7 64, but not with W7 32. Finally I uninstalled "Microsoft Security Essentials" (MSE). Well, apparently MSE was scanning everything I opened That's why the progress bar took so long to complete. Now, I go back and forth no mater how many times and it opens in a flash. Bugger M$ crap.

Thanks for the tips

Regards

John