Access time to SSD takes forever w external USB Disks are plugged in

I have an 500 GB SSD disk and if I just use this this alone then the access time is really fast. But if I plug in some external USB disks then it slows down radically!

One of the USB disk has a distinctive sound when it's being accessed and I can hear this sound when I access a file that is on the SSD.

So it seems like Windows accesses all disks before actually reading the SSD and the file I want to access.

Is there some setting that will remove this behavior?

andis59 said:

So it seems like Windows accesses all disks before actually reading the SSD and the file I want to access.

When you read from your SSD, the USB stick should have no affect on the response time from the SSD "unless" you USB is somehow caught in a continual re-initialization loop. Does this happen when you plug in any USB stick? And, if so, are your USB drivers up to date?

It's not a USB stick, it's five USB external disks, see My Computer, which I have mounted most of the time.

I have looked at Lenovo and there isn't any updates to the USB drivers.
I then used Device Manager and check all disks and USB controllers and I got "Windows has determined the drivers software for your device is up to date" for each driver.

andis59 said:

But if I plug in some external USB disks then it slows down radically!

Your original description doesn't provide the specific detail tht you provided in your second post. Now, I will ask you if you tried disconnecting them all and plugging them back in one at a time to see if that makes any difference when you read from your main SSD.

Good luck

andis59 said:

I have an 500 GB SSD disk and if I just use this this alone then the access time is really fast. But if I plug in some external USB disks then it slows down radically!

One of the USB disk has a distinctive sound when it's being accessed and I can hear this sound when I access a file that is on the SSD.

So it seems like Windows accesses all disks before actually reading the SSD and the file I want to access.

Is there some setting that will remove this behavior?

Do you have any active partitions on those external drives which can sometimes confuse Windows. You can use MiniTool Partition to check partitions on your external drives and set any active ones to inactive.