External drives loading time

[seane01]

Hello,

When I try to acces one of my 4 TB external drives it sometimes takes up to 15 seconds before it shows its content. Is this normal behaviour?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Digerati]

It is not abnormal - especially if this access is the first attempt this computing session (since last boot or wake, for example). But after you access once, if you access it again a few minutes later, it should be quick.

Do note that external drives do not behave like internal drives since external drives also go through the USB interface, and external drives may have their own sleep/standby functions.

 

[seane01]

It's not only the first time it takes that long. When I don't use the external drivers for a few minutes, it again takes the same amount of time when i try to access it...

 

[Digerati]

I can only "guess" that the drive motor is spinning down after some period of time and so the next time there is a call to the drive, the drive motor has to spin back up to normal speed and that takes time. If it works fine once access returns, I don't see how it can be the drive itself. I might check power options to see if set to too short of time.

This is not an uncommon problem, but there does not seem to be a common fix.

Things others have tried is to turn off thumbnails (Always Show Icons) under Folder Options. Making sure under the drive Properties > Customize, the "Optimize this folder for:" option is set to "General items" and checking the box for "Also apply this template to all subfolders" helped some users.

With older versions of Windows, disabling Indexing helped. Indexing with W10 has greatly improved so I generally recommend keeping it enabled with W10.

 

[seane01]

Thanks, now I know i'ts not only me having this problem.