Hi,
hard drives can slow up for a number of reasons although with regular maintenance this can be avoided. Defragging the disks can help and the following link explains how to keep your drives nippy:
Six Reasons Why Your External Drive May Get Slow You could also ensure your USB drivers are the latest and if you post the make and model of your machine (or just motherboard) we can help you find them.
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Thanks for the quick reaction
ASUS N752-VX I checked the link with the six reasons and have to say that I´m quite aware of them: There is a weekly derfragmentation in work, I use this laptop very rarely online (no games whatsovever, no torrents), the external harddisks (Toshiba DTB-320 / 2TB) are equaly new as the laptop (6 months) and treated with great care and respect, when I work with the search function, no other application is active (except antivirus + the regular programs in the background (~ CPU 12-20%, Memory 37 %, Disk 10% while searching files, Network 0%)), no bad sectors...
One further aspect/change (?!?) I would like to emphasize (assuming that this might be a reason for the slowing down?!?): I have the impression that
now the search function looks
not only for specified file names (which would be
my main goal and I assume it did so before the slow down),
but where the file is located/saved, relating to the specified searching file names (and even "hidden" data
inside the file). Therefore it shows a lot of actually irrelevant results, because as mentioned, I´am interested only in looking for
file names...! Did "something" (WHAT?) possibly changed the regular search mechanism. I looked all over the serach properties, not finding a key parameter that might have switched and which I could turned back... Using "name:" in front of the seyrched file name makes the result coming much quicker. But it is inconinient to insert that all the time, and I never used that technique before. I just discoverd it when the speed problems started and googling for alternatives...
How can I make windows just search for filenames, and therefore reducing the effort of the computer...?!?