Hard Drive running slow only under specific circumstances

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DrManhattan

New Member
I recently installed a Western Digital 640 GB eco-green SATA hard drive as a second hard drive for storage on my Windows XP sp3 system, but have run into something I've never encountered before.

I'll first explain the folders and subfolders I have on the drive. I have a folder labeled "Media" with 3 subfolders: "Pictures", "Video", and "other". The folder "pictures" itself has about 150 subfolders, containing a combined total of about 23,000 pictures of varying sizes and types totaling about 4 GB of data. With this, everything runs fine, but the problem occurs when I rename the "Pictures" subfolder to a name that is alphabetically before the other two folders (simply calling the folder "A" for example). When I do this is, accessing the folder "Media" becomes incredibly lagged. Clicking on it once to highlight it will freeze the window momentarily before it becomes highlighted, and navigating back out of the "Media" folder using the windows "back" button on the folder toolbar also creates a lag where the window will freeze while trying to navigate back out of the "media" folder. Change the subfolder "A" back to "pictures" (which is now alphabetically AFTER the folder "other") seems to fix the problem and the drive works perfectly. I've never seen anything like this happen before with any other drive. I have defragmented, reformatted, and done everything else I can think of to fix this issue, but it has not gone away. Anyone have any idea what could cause such a lag of the drive that occurs with such specific circumstances?
 
raoul_1101 said:
Really odd problem :-/
What if you rename the folder to be alphabetically after 'Video', for instance 'Z'?
Click to expand...

Then the problem doesn't occur.

Through a very tedious search and trial and error (remember, the folder does contain 23,000 files) I isolated the problem to two files that were not picture files but actually shortcuts to picture files with no destination file, as I had moved all picture files to the new hard drive (how those shortcuts got there, I'll never know) but it was these two files causing all the problems - just deleting them was a hassle, as when I attempted to highlight them, the computer would freeze for a few moments, but they are gone now, and the issue is non-existent now. For some reason, having the folder that contained these two shortcuts at the top of the directory was slowing down the hard drive.

Just to kind of "clean everything out" I removed all files from the second hard drive, and tomorrow will reformat the entire drive then move all the files back onto it. There's no harm in reformatting the drive multiple times, is there, as it will be the second time in as many days? I've never heard of drives formatted multiple times having any problems from it. Multiple reformats don't harm hard drives, do they?
 
After completing everything done above, I have noticed there is still a small lag in windows navigation when folders with many many files are present on the second hard drive. Is it a known problem for there to be a lag in navigation in and out of folders that contain a very large number of files on some hard drives? I just transferred over a folder of about 3000 mp3 files to the second hard drive, and have noticed a similar (but slightly slower) lag when navigating into that folder. When navigating into the folder that contains the folder of 23000 picture files, the lag is even more present (although no where near the lag experienced with the two shortcut-to-nowhere files).
 
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