my maxtor lag

[ErwinRommel]

hi. i got my big PC long time ago and here i go with problems again. this time it's my maxtor HDD. it seems that it's kinda overloaded or sth, cos when i double click on my -entertainment- folder [bout 40GBs- music, movies and games], the pc stops responding for bout 6secs and it's good to go again after that. what's the matter? is it because there's to much data [like 30,000 or more files] in it? of course, there are lot's of subfolders, but i still don't get it. n now i'm forced to burn my cds at lower speeds, cos those damn buffer underruns are just a waste of blanks.
ideas, anyone?

[ErwinRommel]

and one more Q- if i got an 80GBz hard drive (bios and manufacturer says so), why do windows show that it's capacity only is 76GBz. is this somekinda xp trick to keep some free space for "smooth" performance?
i know that i should format my HDD, but it's really curious why browsing the data became soo ugly- this maxtor is only 2 months old and nevertheless it's --the phrase from MEMPHIS' BELLE--

respect.

[zandor]

You just experienced the difference between a binary and a decimal gigabyte.
HD manufacturers call a gigabyte 1000000000 bytes. Memory manufacturers call use 2^30 (1073741824) bytes, since memory chips are traditionally sized in powers of 2.. Windows agrees with the memory manufacturers. Since your 80GB drive shows up as 76GB, as far as the hard disk manufacturer is concerned you're actually getting more space than you paid for, since 76 * (2^30) = 81604378624 bytes, or roughly 81.6 GB.

[TheMostWantedPolishTwin]

what file system? FAT32? if the directory has so many entries it takes a while to read them all...

[Ice Czar]

when was the last time you defraged that partition?

in addition to the difference in binary and decimal you loose capacity from filesystem overhead as well,
which varies from filesystem to filesystem (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/os.htm) and your cluster (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/clust.htm) slection

in general between all those factors,
you should be looking at approximately a 10% decrease once formatted,
from the stated capacity on the HDD

[ErwinRommel]

it's NTFS. defragmentation- well, i do that kinda once in two weeksor sth, except if windows "recommends" me NOT to defrag.
but strangely D doesn't help in this situation. that's why i'm stuck-
cos i'm not yet ready to format all my stuff out. :(