I have a 4TB My Book external USB drive from April 2015 used as a backup of my internal hard drives with the included WD SmartWare backup program. I made a mistake by including in the backup my entire User folder of my Windows 7 which over the years have created backups of millions unnecessary temporary files from the cash folders of Firefox browser. While I was regularly purging those cashed files from my system I didn’t think those are piling in the backup, taking space and causing unnecessary wear and tear until now when the hard drive is almost full and I’m trying to clean it up. On the back up I have 7 browser profiles each with cash folders containing millions of files. When I opened the Properties of one of these cash folders it took more than an hour just to count more than 6.5 million files taking more than 300GB. I also tried the same with the other cash folders but when the counting reached about a couple of millions I cancelled the counting. I tried Shift + Delete on one the cash folders to erase the files permanently without first moving them to the trash bin but cancelled the operation after it took a day to delete only about a million of files. With 7 cash folders I’m assuming I might have more than 40 million of those files that will take about a month to delete them + the wear and tear on the hard drive. My new plan is to format the drive which I expect to be much faster than deleting those millions of files and use the drive again more efficiently as a backup. My question is if there is a better way to deal with this issue and if using Windows 7 formatting tools is the best way to format the hard drive which is by the way suggested on the WD support page for my hard drive here:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8200/h/p2#win7
I’m not affiliated with the company, but i’ve been using the free version of AOMEI Partition Assistant for years without a single problem … first i delete the partition table and then format it, takes less than 30 seconds for a 4TB drive.
Normally, the computer storage drives are quiet and steady, but in case of any physical damages or logical corruption, they can begin to make noise. There are numbers of different hard drive clicking sounds for different reasons.
If there is any noise, then you can try the subsequent fixes which people have used to overcome the issue:
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Check whether the hard drive is getting enough power or not. You can do it by plugging the power adapter directly into the power supply.
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Replace the data cable with the new one and turn on the drive. Now, if it does not make any noise, then the data cable might be faulty.
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In case the drive still makes noises, then there is a high possibility the drive is failing and needs to be replaced.
Mainly, HDD failure can happen due to the bad power supply, virus attack, damaged block, sectors, and corrupted operating system. Here, I also suggest you to check out the below blog that explains all the measures to check the health of any hard disk.
Hope it will help.
