Hard Disk Recovery

I connect my external hard drive to my PC. However, when I try to open it and access its files, it always takes a long time to open the files. Now, what should we do if you encounter the “external hard drive slow to open files” issue?

Don’t worry! This post shows how to fix the “external hard drive slow to open files” issue.

If you find your external hard drive takes a long time to respond and open files, you can try changing the SATA data cable and changing the USB 2.0 port to USB 3.0 port. If these cannot work, try the following fixes:

1. Scan your computer for viruses

Running software to scan computer is the first thing you need to do when external hard drive slow to open folders. Get rid of any viruses, malware or other threats are detected by the program.

2. Check and repair hard drive logic errors and bad sectors.

As we know, if your external hard drive has some bad sectors, it will take a long time to respond. Now, you can try using MiniTool Partition Wizard to check whether it has bad sectors.

Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to open its main interface.

Select the target disk and then click “Surface Test” from the left action panel, or right-click the target disk at first, and then select “Surface Test” from the drop-down menu.

Click “Start Now” button in the new window to start disk surface test.

After scanning, if you find red color, you need to use specific software to shield bad tracks. After that, you can check whether your external hard drive takes long time to respond. If yes, try the following solution.

3. Export data to another drive.

 If your external hard drive slows to open files, you’d better recover lost data from this drive! However, how to recover lost data since this external hard drive takes long time to recover?

Here, MiniTool Power Data Recovery is a wise choice for you. In general, as long as the data loss is not caused by hardware failure and the lost data have not been overwritten by new data, you can recover them.

Besides, this professional data recovery offers wizard-like interfaces as well as simple operations. Thus, even a new user can easily recover lost data by using this data recovery tool.

Video Watch

Click Play button to learn how to carry out hard drive data recovery.

4. Perform disk defragmentation to optimize the disk.

 As we know, optimizing drives can help your PC run smoother and boot up faster. Now, you can try the following steps to optimize your drive to solve the “external hard drive slow to open files” issue.

Select the search bar on the taskbar and enter defrag.

Select Defragment and Optimize Drives.

Select the disk drive you want to optimize.

Select the Optimize button.

5. Place the slow external hard drive a new one.

If all else fails, you might consider that there are some physical problems on your external hard drive. In this case, you have no choice but to find a new drive to replace it to solve the “external hard drive slow to open files” issue.

I hoped this post can help you effectively solve the external hard drive takes long time to open files issue.

Now, tell us which method help you effectively solved the “external hard drive slow to open files” issue.

Should you have any question or suggestions, please contact us via support@minitool.com. We will upgrade this article.