PC/Windows I/O problem?

[LookingForAJob]

Looking for a bit of advice. I have a high-spec PC with Windows 10 Pro installed. All satisfactory except for accessing HDDs. In Windows Explorer, it sometimes takes more than a second to open up a folder or to show the content of another drive - which seems awfully slow compared to other machines (and this is after switching off power-saving features that might take a while to wake up a device when it hasn't been used recently). Writing to the HDDs equally feels slow. There are 5 drives attached, 4 HDD and 1 SSD - the HDDs are pretty average WD Blue or Red devices. Accessing the SSD, probably not surprisingly, is faster. I wondered whether having this number of disks may be causing the problem.

I've had a quick look around for tools to evaluate I/O performance but nothing jumps out at me so I thought I'd ask here for views. Does any kind soul who knows how Windows works have any idea whether having lots of drives attached slows things down, or have any other suggestions or pointers as to why I my machine might be a bit sluggish in this area?

Many TIA.

[jimjim1]

I am not super hot on this but I would start with looking closely at Resource Monitor's Disk tab to see if there was unusual activity shown there.

Maybe its checking for updates endlessly or Search Indexing endlessly and so the disks are always busy.

May as well look in task manager too for anything using loads of CPU that you don't know what it is.

Have you got enough memory? Look at page fault delta in Task manager.

With any weird behaviour I check the OS integrity with

sfc /scannow

in an Administrator window.

If it cant fix errors dism (oh I forget the params:)

[BFM]

Windows will cope perfectly fine with 5 drives; I have one with 4 and it's lightning fast. However it also has 32Gb of RAM and so has plenty of room to play. Open resource monitor and see how many hard page faults you are getting while opening files. If you are getting lots you need more RAM. I think it unlikely that you have excessive disc fragmentation as the SSD is immune to that.

[tucumseh]

Try this ......... System >> Advanced System Settings >> Performance >> Advanced >> Virual Memory >> change paging file size to zero, as it is unnecessary with a Solid State Drive.

Sorry if the terms are different in Windows 10. Tried it once but reverted to Windows 7.

Is your SSD an M2/NVMe drive? If not, and you have an M2 slot, give it a try for the OS drive. Samsung seem to get the best reviews.

Hope this helps.

[Asturias56]

try these

https://windowsreport.com/file-explorer-slow-windows-10/

[LookingForAJob]

Many thanks for the suggestions - working through them now.

[jimjim1]

Try this ......... System >> Advanced System Settings >> Performance >> Advanced >> Virual Memory >> change paging file size to zero, as it is unnecessary with a Solid State Drive.


Hmmm. This is incorrect.

With an SSD the performance of the Pagefile will be improved but for sure you still need one.

If you have a lot of memory, depending on your use, it may be possible to eliminate the pagefile however this will prevent the creation of Dumps if the system should crash.

This is nice-
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/determine-appropriate-page-file-size