Windows 7 - HDD thrashing with very long file coping times

Asked By irritated and unable to wor

15-Mar-08 03:36 AM

HI all,
whenever i try to copy a file onto my hard drive, the HDD shows
intense activity and the copy times  go up exponentially.this happens when
doin copy-paste operation from one folder, on the same drive to another,
copying from a usb drive and copying from the lan network(the transfer speed
from the network is around 1.5 Mpbs, there is no issue with the network
itself but jsut my terminal.)
also when windows is booting there is again intense HDD activity and
it takes around 5 minutes to boot up to the login screen.The same occurs when
i login to windows with my account.
i have tried scanning my notebook for viruses(symantic enppoint
portection with updated definitions), turned off system restore,turned off
indexing service and automatic disk defrag.ive also tried to shut down all
the extra startup programs but the problem remains.Any ideas as to what could
be wrong?

16-Mar-08 08:14 AM

A couple of possibilitties:

1.  Antivirus is setup to scan every file every time it is used in any way
(scan on access).  That is normally a good thing, but can slow down a copy.
Try turning it off, but only while copying.
2.  Hard drive is badly fragmented and/or nearly full.  Try defraging and
cleanup to leave at least 15% free space.
3.  Too little RAM.  I have found that copy&paste works best, if the RAM is
about twice the size of the file being copied, or maybe about 256 Meg for XP
itself, then more for the size of the file.
4.  Hard drive has bad blocks or is otherwise failing.  Run CHKDSK with the
/R option on each parition, then reboot.  (e.g., CHKDSK C: /R)  CHKDSK will
fix some file system problems and give you a count of bad blocks, if any.  A
few bad blocks on a large hard drive is normal.  But, increasing bad blocks
with time is an indication that the hard drive starting to fail.