I recently bought a 26TB Seagate external hard drive. Strangely, just having it plugged in seems to make my PC almost unusable. It freezes when I try to open anything or browse File Explorer, and a restart that normally takes 20-30 seconds has now been stuck for 20 minutes. The drive keeps turning on and off while this happens. What's going on?
4 Answers
Just a heads up, make sure you're not trying to use it with just a single USB connector. If it came with a Y cable or power adapter, use that to ensure it gets enough power. Also, check if you're connecting it to the fastest USB port available.
It sounds like you might have a faulty drive. Having it connected shouldn't bog down your whole system like that, especially if you're not accessing it. I would recommend checking if it has any bad sectors with a tool like CrystalDiskInfo. If you're seeing a lot of errors, it might be time to return it.
Have you considered that Windows might be trying to index it? This could really slow everything down while your PC is working to catalog the drive. Try turning off indexing for that drive and see if that helps.
That's a good thought! I'll look into disabling indexing. I mainly just want the drive for backups and occasional movie streaming.
You also mentioned trying to transfer files to it. Make sure that any transfer process was actually completed. If it crashed midway, the drive could be stuck in a weird state or even damaged. Data integrity is key here, especially if it’s a brand new drive.
Yeah, the transfer didn't go smoothly, and I got a critical hardware failure message. Looks like I need to format the drive anyway.
I’ll definitely check that out! I figured it might be slow since it's an external drive, but I didn't expect it to affect everything else.