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I have a Samsung MS 1TB portable hard drive and did one back up direct from Windows which took up 400 + GB. I am deleting it in order to set up real time back up instead. The Drive Manager shows the drive as empty - but is is active and so I guess it is in the process of deleting all the stuff. External drive linked via USB. Being clueless about such things ... I'm wondering how long it will take to complete the delete process. Thanks for your help.

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  • If the drive activity light is only flashing occasionally (say, every one or two seconds) then it has probably finished deleting the files. You can make sure by using the "Safely remove hardware..." icon in the system tray to try ejecting the portable hard drive - it won't let you do that if it really is busy. Of course, you'll have to unplug the drive and plug it back in after a couple of seconds if it does succeed. Nov 9, 2014 at 20:17

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When you delete files on a hard drive the space is merely marked as deleted, the data itself isn't deleted until you write new data there. Therefore deleting files is usually quite quick, but it depends on the number of files. 400 GB of 100 GB files should only take a few seconds, but 400 GB of 1 KB files would take several minutes.

I do large backups to external drives too, and I've found that deleting 600 GB of files that are mostly under 100 MB usually takes less than 5 minutes, but it really depends on the drive.

If it's taking your drive more than 25 minutes to delete your 400 GB of data, then that would be a bit concerning, but there is nothing you can do except wait for it to finish; meaning when the delete dialogue closes. If you disconnect the drive while it's in use you could corrupt filesystem records, and end up loosing other data that's on the drive.

If you believe the drive has finished, but the deletion dialogue is still open try as @Andrew Morton has suggested, safely remove the drive using the safely remove hardware dialogue found in the system tray; if the drive is still in use, your removal request will be denied.

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