Why so long to delete files from external HDD?

I'm doing some work on my brother in law's laptop. I used his external HDD to create a system image which worked fine. I also see backups from computers he doesn't even have anymore that are old, some from as far back as 2003. Anyway, when I selecet them and hit delete, it takes 20 minutes or more to delete these old backups. Why does it take so long? I turned off moving the files to the recycle bin so it should be just a matter of the OS marking that space available, right?

For the most part the files are deleted bam, bam, bam but every once in awhile it will pause on deletion of a single file for a minute or more. There are no error messages so I don't believe these pauses are due to read errors.

Any suggestions on speeding up things?

Antiviruses like to interfere with activity on externals. You could try disabling that.
You could also (while the external is plugged in) right click the trash bin and tell it not to cache items from the external. (this will remove your ability to recover items deleted from that drive from the recycle bin.

...but honestly it's a feature I probably use once or twice a year anyway.

I mentioned in my original post that I had turned off moving to the recycle bin but I had forgotten about turning off the AV. I turned off real-time protection on MSE and that seemed to speed things up. Thanks for the reply. Now I just need to remeber to turn those things back on when I am done!

strollin said:

I mentioned in my original post that I had turned off moving to the recycle bin but I had forgotten about turning off the AV. I turned off real-time protection on MSE and that seemed to speed things up. Thanks for the reply. Now I just need to remeber to turn those things back on when I am done!

Yeah, sorry I did read the post that was just before my coffee was ready this morning.
You may want to look into messing with write caching too. but it can make things a bit less reliable. So I do tend to leave it alone myself.

FliGi7 said:

I doubt this has anything to do with AV interfering. Have you done a simple Check Disk on the hard drive to see if there are any errors or bad sectors? Excessive wait times and freezes for simple file operations is a symptom of such things.

From personal experience I can tell you that they can and very often do.
It seems to have noticeably sped up his problem, as he marked the thread solved afterwards.

If you think about it, the av is actually doing it's job by starting to aggressively investigate the new drive.
It also takes it upon itself to monitor the data stream between the computer and the device.

This is not so much a fault as a necessity for the av to do it's job thoroughly.

I'm not really certain why you've decided to argue this point with me.
Perhaps you should read about how av's actually work. Real-time protection can be a beast. Many of the av's filter so aggressively they actually create virtual devices complete with drivers and everything upon their installation specifically for the purpose of essentially monitoring all data moving through your system. (surprising how often viruses do manage to slip by all this if you ask me)

You seem to be thinking I am calling this some form of fault. It is as said just a minute ago pretty much a necessity though. His question was, how do I speed this up? I thought my reply was a logical one given the nature of the request.

The problem is drastically compounded with a usb drive as well.
Another solution would be to go eSATA, it can handle the back and forth data stream much better. USB always seems to work best when the majority of the data is flowing in one direction without interruption.