When I connect My Book to any desktop I own there is a long delay in opening screen icons native to Windows 7. Recycle Bin, for instance. You can’t get any more native than that iconic icon! Anyway, I hadn’t used my pc for an hour and I clicked on the Recycle Bin icon and nothing happened. I clicked again and again and finally I saw the disc icon that appears attached to the mouse pointer and finally the Recycle Bin opened. I am aware of spin down and I appreciate WD trying to save my My Book. If I am away from my pc for an hour and I try to open My Book it takes a while for My Book to spin up and open. But now it is happening to functions and icons that have nothing to do with My Book. Can anyone tell me what is happening? Thank you.
Hello telltale,
As a recommendation, test the drive with the WD DLG tool, that will allow you to identify if there’s an issue with the My Book drive.
How to test a drive for problems using Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows
Try disabling the sleep function completely and see if that helps.
You might think that the recycle bin has nothing to do with your external drive, but it does.
If you delete something from the external frive, it doesn’t actually delete it.
It puts it in a sort of limbo, ready to be put back where it came from until the recycle bin is emptied.
If you haven’t emptied the recycle bin in a long time, the delay as it spins up the drive and validates whatever it has to on it will become longer and longer. Don’t forget, there is storage for the recycle bin on the drive itself if anything has ever been deleted off of it, so when you open up the recycle bin on the desktop, it needs to link to that as well.
Check the SMART status of the drive.
If the drive is starting to fail, it may be taking a long time before it reads the zero track and finally comes online.
This could slow down the opening of “My Computer”, the recycle bin, and anything else that may have links or ties to the drive.
Regardless of what any diagnostics say, this might be a good time to make copies of anything important that you may have that only exists on that drive.
Thank you for your reply. I should say that I use my Western Digital My Book Essential on a pc that is not connected to the internet. However, that being said, my little problem also happened when I opened a folder that I created on my desktop. Said folder would not open until a significant amount of time elapsed. Must I disconnect my Western Digital My Book Essential when it is not in use to prevent this? I buy Western Digital internal hardrives exclusively and I have never had any sort of problem. But my Western Digital My Book Essential seems to delay the functions of my pc. I have activated the password function of my Western Digital My Book Essential. I have three other INTERNAL hardrives on said pc and they never delay or interfere with the opening of any folder, the Recycle Bin or any other program or execution. Why does my Western Digital My Book Essential do this? My Western Digital My Book Essential is new and only has 900 gigabytes on it. The compression feature is never used. In the case of the folder problem, my Western Digital My Book Essential was password unlocked and functioning and it was spinning at the use level and was not in its dormant low spin status. It is indeed a mystery. But you want to know what really bothers me? Is my Western Digital My Book Essential going to extend its password protection feature onto files that are NOT on its harddrive? Otherwise it works flawlessly. Thank you.
