Would A Faulty Internal Hard Drive Make File Explorer Unresponsive? (Not C: drive)

[livewire]

I have six internal hard drives (5 mechanical and 1 ssd for the OS)

A few days ago I started getting a problem in Windows 8.1 where my mouse was freezing for a second every now and then. Also when I opened file explorer and clicked on a drive (Steam games) file explorer became unresponsive and the area surrounding file explorer went black and I had to shutdown holding the power button. I looked in the pc to make sure the cables to this drive were ok and thought the sata cable may have come out slightly.

When I turned the pc back on file explorer seemed to be working normally and I could click on this Steam drive and view contents, I looked at disk management and it said all the drives were healthy so turned the pc off. I turned the pc on today and opened file explorer and all the drives except C: were not showing any information just the disk icon and name of the drive, the green loading bar in the address area of file explorer was going across dead slow too, it soon became unresponsive again and I had to shutdown holding the power button again.

I've taken the Steam drive out for now to see if it resolves the issue and it all seems to be working fine at the moment but I guess my question is can a faulty secondary hard drive cause Windows to become unresponsive like this? Or could it be another problem like the motherboard on the way out?

I wouldn't have thought a faulty secondary drive would have made file explorer unresponsive but I don't really know?

 

[Teeotsa]

Probably because of a faulty hard drive. I have same issues with my external hdd, Windows just hangs up randomly and disk response time is absurdly high (over 30 seconds...). Its not always like that tho, my solution is to unplug it and plug it back in. Should change the disk.

 

[TechnoMage]

If Explorer is having trouble reading a drive, it can and probably will cause Explorer to lag or even appear to freeze.

Good Luck,
TM

 

[livewire]

Thanks for your replies confirming the hard drive. Since taking the hard drive out I have not had any problems, everything is working fine. I just didn't think a faulty secondary hard drive would make Windows unresponsive like that. I thought maybe the drive would just not show up in Explorer or Windows would pop-up an error message or something. I'll know now to check the drives first if and when it happens again.

 

[erpster4]

time to replace that faulty hard drive with a new one