How to Fix a Slow External Hard Drive in Windows 10

Is Your External Hard Disk Drive Slower Than Before?

Is your external hard disk drive slower than it used to be? Here are the potential causes and how to fix the issue.

Plugged your external hard disk drive into your computer and noticed it's slower than it used to be? If you use the drive regularly, this could be easily explained: perhaps it's slowing down because it's old or needs defragging.

Disable Windows indexing for faster performance

The sooner you do this and are able to copy the data from your old device, the better. Leave it too late and data on the old HDD may be completely irretrievable.

1. Defrag Your Slow External Hard Drive

Whenever you experience hard disk issues, one of the first things you should do is defragment your drive. Windows 10 features the Defragment and Optimize Drives tool. To use this:

1. Click Start
2. Type "defragment" or "optimize"
3. Click Defragment and Optimize Drives
4. Select the troublesome drive
5. Select Analyze
6. Wait while it completes
7. If action is required, click Optimize

On older versions of Windows, SSDs should not be used with standard defragmentation tools. As SSDs are flash-based, older defrag tools are likely to damage your data, if not the disk itself.

Fortunately, Windows 10 does not have this problem. The Defragment and Optimize Drives tool manages the optimization of SSDs as well as HDDs.

2. Check Your Slow Hard Drive For Physical Damage

If you've made it this far with no improvement, there's a possibility that your HDD is damaged. You should take the time to check the disk carefully, paying special attention to the following:

1. Does the LED light flash or not?
2. Does the computer hang when you attempt to browse the disk?
3. Does Check Disk fail?
4. Is the disk rattling when you hear it spin?

Although protected by the drive enclosure, hard disks are delicate, regardless of the bulky appearance. Not only can the disks themselves be damaged by a slight knock, so too can the read heads.

3. Is Too Much Activity Slowing Your Hard Disk?

If you're copying large quantities of data to or from your computer, this can result in a slow external drive.

For instance, you might be copying huge video files from your PC to the drive. Or you might be using it as a destination drive for torrent files. Either way, if large amounts of data are involved, an external HDD (or an internal one) can slow down considerably.

To find out if this is the case, use the Task Manager.

1. Launch Task manager using Ctrl + Shift + Esc or right-click the Taskbar and select Task Manager.
2. Click the Disk column header to sort applications by disk utilization.

If the answer is Windows Explorer, then the problem is due to copying data. But you could be using a torrent app, or image or video editing tool. You might even be running a video game from a USB 3.0 drive. Whatever the app is, select it and click End task to stop it. This will hopefully return the drive to its usual working speed.

4. Are Viruses And Malware Slowing Your External Hard Drive?

It can never be said regularly enough: you should be running an active antivirus tool on your computer. Even if you're not, you should have a tool that you can use to run malware scans.

Whatever the case, a rogue script could be accessing your hard disk drive and slowing it down. Worse still, the script (what we would usually term malware) might be already on your external hard drive. The slowdown isn't from the disk itself, but your PC or laptop. Literally, the external hard drive is slowing down your Windows 10 computer.

To scan a drive:

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Right-click the drive.
3. Find the antivirus or malware scanning software in the context menu.
4. Select the option to scan the disk.

If this option isn't available, open the security software and manually scan the disk. The method for this differs depending on your chosen security software

5. Is Windows 10 Indexing Slowing Your External Hard Drive?

Finally, you could kick your slow external HDD back into life by disabling Windows 10's indexing service. Often when you connect your HDD to your PC, Windows takes forever to display its contents in Explorer. The reason is that Windows 10 is busy indexing the drive.

Disabling indexing stops this and speeds things up. The drawback is that Windows search will be limited to filenames, rather than metadata. This will reduce the speed of finding files on your drive if you don't know the filename.

To disable indexing:

1. Press Windows + R.
2. Enter "services.msc".
3. Click
4. In the Services window scroll down to Windows Search.
5. Right-click and select
6. Click Stop.
7. Wait for this to complete.
8. Click Startup type > Disabled.
9. Disconnect and reconnect your external hard disk drive and open it in Windows Explorer.

It should now load quickly as if it was an internal drive.

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