USB external hard drives

[realaleman]

Hi, all you experts
I've just recently bought a Maxtor 160Gb USB hard drive to
do backups of my 40Gb drive C. I feel a lot safer now that all my data is secure. What I want to ask is why, when the Maxtor drive is connected, everything I want to load from the internal drive (from firefox to Word documents, even shutdown ) seems to happen at about one quarter of the normal speed. Is this normal? I thought I would be able to leave it connected all the time and use it for saving the occasional big file that I don't want on drive C, but the sluggishness of the system means I can only plug it in when I want to do a backup!
Thanks in anticipation
Geoff

[rojash]

It's certainly not normal. I have two USB external drives permanently connected with no problems.
I wonder if your AV is scanning the drive unnecessarily, or if Windows is frantically indexing it.

If your AV is set to perform a scan on startup, you could tell to skip this drive (as the only vector for a virus would be via you exiting drive, which is presumably protected already).

You could also turn off the indexing service for the external drive (My computer, right-click drive, properties, uncheck "Allow Indexing service to index this drive..."

[realaleman]

Hi Rojash
Your answer was brill as usual. I've just unchecked the indexing box as you suggested and everything is now back to its usual 0 to 60 time.
Thanks very much

Geoff