random reads from 2TB External HDD when opening various programs

I have a 2TB external drive that is slow becaue it is 80% full of music, videos, pictures, and program installers, but I get random reads from it when opening Firefox, Google Chrome, Gimp, OpenOffice, and even opening pictures in the "my pictures" folder with Windows Photo Viewer will trigger these reads from my drive causing a 20 - 30 second delay for the program to open up while it reads from the slow drive. why is it randomly reading from the drive and how do I stop it?? none of the programs that trigger these reads need anything from the drive

Hi,

Best way to avoid that is to safely remove your external drive from your PC when you're not using it or don't need anything from it while using your PC.

Hi there

Check also there's no "paging" file on it too.

A Disk doesn't though have to be slow merely because it's getting full -- especially if you are playing music etc -- Video streaming is another matter though - you need a good FAST Wifi connection of AT LEAST 2Mb/sec and a decent fast disk -- usually small external USB drives (the "passport" portable drives) are probably too slow to stream full 1080p HD movies over a Wi-Fi network -- AVI and some compressed mkv / mp4 files might work though.

Even self powered external USB drives work better when connected to a USB port via a POWERED Hub. (Don't have too many on the same hub if you want to do a lot of I/O though).

I often run a Windows Virtual Machine from a Linux Host running on an external USB3 2TB drive -- I've got loads of video on it (The Linux host partition is 20 GB, 50 GB for the Windows VM and the rest is a Windows data partition and it all runs fine even from a laptop. I'm actually using it now (Windows 8.1 VM from the Linux Host) from a Company Laptop -- working in Belgium with a FRENCH version of Windows -- don't like it so booted up my External VM with English version !!! where I can also run my video streaming program. !!

Check also that you aren't running too many concurrent applications that require access to the disk -- and BTW YOU DO HAVE BACKUP don't you -- HDD's DO fail - although fortunately it's rarer than you think.

Cheers
jimbo