Hard Drive Slowing Down

[unfrozen caveman lawyer]

I am having a strange problem with a Maxtor 10 gig hard drive that I have been using for about 18 months now. The hard drive keeps running slower and slower. Programs that used to load right up can now take a minute or longer to start. I am using this hard drive as a slave, if I move programs that run slow from this hard drive over to my "C" drive they run great.

I have re-partioned and re-formatted the drive, but it is still running slow.

Any suggestions?

[NDC]

The slow down on disk performance may be due to data fragmentation and also low disk space...

[NDD]

Check if it runs with "DMA" enabled. Try moving to another IDE channel as Master. Check for external damage.

Best Regards ...

[unfrozen caveman lawyer]

I have partioned, formatted and de-fragemented the drive.

I only have about 4 gig of data on it, so there is plenty of free space. I have never had a hard drive act like this before, very strange.

[jtv]

You also want to "enable write behind cache" on the drive. To do this go to the system icon in the control panel. Click on performance, file system, removable disk, and check the box.

Also, run scandisk and defrag. It will also run faster (the entire system) if you clean the registry. I use the NBG Clean Registry program, and then run Registry Compressor Pro. These are both shareware programs. They will clean up your system and it will run up to 80% faster.

Good Luck