Folder access on External Hard Drve is extremely slow and sometimes the folder and file info in properties is incorrect

Question

My OS is Windows 7.

The external hard drive is a SATA hard drive in an enclosure.

As listed in the title the folder access is slow on External Hard Drive.

If I click on the left arrow on a folder it takes very long time for the folder to expand.

When I right click on Properties. The folder and files listed is not always correct. At times it is not counting folders and files under the sub-directories that have not been expanded.

Has anyone seen a similar issue and has any suggestions.

Edit 1: I only have one computer at the moment which a laptop.

Answer 1

This probably has to do with security permissions on the file/folders. We have a lot of older XP boxes that are being replaced with Windows 7 laptops. While plugging the XP drive into an external enclosure to transfer the 20+ GB of files it takes a while for Windows 7 to go through the permissions of each file/folder. Right click on the root folder you want access to and change the security permissions of the current machine and user to full access. Once this goes through and changes all the security permissions you will be able to access all the files you need in a timely manner (not that it will take a while to go through the change in security permissions but at least you will be able to access the files).

Answer 2

Drive some drive speed measurement tool, like IoMeter to see that the drive is performing as it should. You could also take the SATA drive out of the enclosure and connect it straight to SATA connector on your motherboard or eSATA port to see if the performance there is as it should be.

Answer 3

It might be worth running a chkdsk on the drive before you do anything else just in case there are errors on the file system. You can do this by right clicking on the drive and doing properties then going to the tools tab and choosing check now.

You could also defragment the drive from the same tab which may improve performance but I'd do the check first.