Slow access to secondary hard drive (not set to sleep)

Question

I'm running two 1 TB Western Digital drives, and in Windows 7, the secondary one is slow to access. Windows Explorer shows a green progress bar at the top while it loads. Here's the weird part. It's VERY fast for any subdirectories. If I enter a large subdirectory, I can go into all the directories inside it very quickly, and files load quickly. But, if I navigate backwards to the root (I have it mounted as M:), there's a delay before it shows up again. I have Windows set to index the entire partition. There's currently about 200 GB used on the drive. Under the power settings, the hard disks are set to not turn off.

Any suggestions of what I can try?

Updated:

Turning off indexing didn't seem to affect access speed.

I have defragged the drive, but it had very little fragmentation to begin with and didn't seem to affect anything.

I'm in the process of running the error-checking scan including scanning for bad sectors.

Second update:

No errors found on the drive and the behavior is still occurring.

Third update:

I did a full format on the drive after backing up my data. I just restored my data back to the drive, and this problem still exists. Any more suggestions?

Answer 1

I would make sure write caching is enabled for the drive. You also might want to test turning indexing off, while this may not be the issue I have heard of people receiving slowdowns such as yours because of it. 200 GB is not really much to have indexed but it is worth trying. Also try running error checking to make sure there is nothing wrong with drive, the drive may be failing or have a bad sector. You can also try a defrag, while I highly doubt fragmentation is the issue here it wont hurt to run it.

Answer 2

Try using Western Digital's Data Life Guard Tools to run a diagnostic. That will be a bit more low lever than Window's scandisk

Answer 3

This is a windows 7 problem. For some as yet unknown reason it just does not like to work with secondary (or tertiary) hard drives. Windows XP used to access both my drives just fine. Upgraded to Windows 7 and now I can't get D:\ & E:\ to work reliably for anything. It's like those two drives are connected to the motherboard through a 28k modem now. All my music is on my D:\ Drive and sometimes it takes 5 to 10 minutes to start playing songs. Best bet would be to revert to XP.