C, E and F drives

[Pannonian]

C drive is my boot drive, E and F drives are storage drives. When I move files between E and F, C seems to want to get involved as well, with the activity lights on C and E corresponding exactly. This only applies to activity involving the E drive - of the 3 hard drives, if any activity involves the F drive only, C doesn't intrude, or at least not noticeably. In contrast, if I do anything involving the E drive, it will only do so in short bursts, each burst accompanied by a burst of activity from the C drive, and it also slows down explorer so that mouse movement is severely affected.

What's going on with the E drive?

[Whacker]

Are they USB drives? Is your mouse USB, and on the same hub as your external drives? The only time I ever noticed the behavior you described with the mouse slowing down was when I had a setup like that once. Try to leave your keyboard/mouse on their own USB hub to avoid input problems.

Also, in regards to C going when doing things with E and F, that's probably going to be due to your swapfile being on C where Windows is, and/or things such as antivirus or malware/spyware tools inspecting dynamic file traffic. Norton/Symantec products do this quite a bit, I would imagine others do as well.

Cheers

[Pannonian]

Never mind, I've worked it out. I'd disabled secondary slave in the BIOS during an earlier experiment, and forgot to set it back. I'm impressed it still managed to do things with the E drive regardless, but that was where the performance hit was coming from.