(Yesterday, 06:42 PM)harm_less Wrote: Update on this issue is that once I got access to Downloads I deleted a few files that I'd accumulated over the last week or two which were of no further use and what do you know the Downloads folder now accesses easy as. But my Recycle Bin developed an access issue, so it seems a recently downloaded file may have been the culprit.
After a bit of faffing around I've now managed to empty the Recycle Bin so hopefully all good from here on in.
One of those files could have been in an area of the drive which has bad sector(s)
Taking ages to open a folder/file is one symptom of your drive trying to read data from a bad sector.
I would check the SMART data readout of the drive and see if the "pending sector" and similar counts are above zero, which would indicate this being a possibility.
If there are bad/pending/reallocated sector errors in SMART, backup anything important you haven't already. Often, drives fail outright soon after their first sector failure.
Annoyingly, SMART will not trip an error code on just one or two bad sectors. It generally takes a significant amount before it will alert you, at which point, things may be too late.