Hard Drive Suddenly Really Slow

[koberulz]

I'm creating a DVD in Adobe Encore, the final stage of which is writing the finished DVD image to disk. It's 8.45GB, usually takes 5-10 minutes. It's estimated to take over an hour.

It also took me over ten minutes to delete 350GB of video files.

Playing videos in VLC is impossible, unless I watch them all the way through. If I want to jump around I have to wait for it to buffer, kind of like streaming except slower.

It was working just fine earlier today, although I have had brief slow periods before.

It's a 5TB drive with about 1TB of free space.

 

[wither 2]

You might go to Accessories, System Tools and run Disk Cleanup (I know you have 1 TB free space). When it says how much space it can free up, check the boxes for Temporary Files (Temporary Internet Files is checked by default) and Recycle Bin.

Reboot.

Does that help?

 

[koberulz]

It's only 3GB in the recycle bin, that's it.

It's a data-only drive, not my OS drive.

 

[wither 2]

Didn't realize that is a data drive.

However, Adobe is going to write a lot of temporary files to your C: drive while it encodes the video to the DVD-Video structure. If you do that sort of thing routinely without a cleanup, those files add up and slow things down. They could also affect the VLC Player playback. You should periodically run a cleanup on that drive. Nothing hurt by giving it a try.

5-10 minutes to delete 350 GB doesn't sound outrageous.

 

[koberulz]

Really? It wasn't a total wipe, just a Windows Explorer shift-delete. Usually takes seconds. And the creation of the DVD structure was done, all it had to do was write the data. Again, usually takes 5-10 minutes and ended up taking over an hour.

ImgBurn and Media Encoder have kicked the occasional I/O error writing to/reading from that drive, too. So I've just bought a new one, to be safe. Running with no backups here.

 

[wither 2]

Yeh, if you already have the Video_TS folder on your hard drive and are simply burning it, an hour is far too long.

I would still try what I suggested. Note that when it says how much space it can save and then select the other options and let it run, it doesn't tell you how much space it really cleans up.

If that doesn't help, I think that you should run a clean boot to see if some program running in the background is hogging resources.