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I have a huge backup archive on a secondary hard drive that I'm deleting right now. After hours of progress in the delete dialog windows is now stuck on 99% and is filling up my RAM. Interestingly the disk usage is now coming from my primary hard drive.

Can someone explain what is happening in the deletion process?

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Edit: By killing (and restarting) the explorer.exe I could get the RAM free and the files there actually gone.

jwillmer
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    What’s more likely is you have encountered a situation where Windows has ran into I/O errors. It makes since that a file operation would use system memory to move the file from its current location to the recycle bin. The primary drive is being used because that’s where the recycle bin is. – Ramhound Mar 08 '18 at 10:48
  • @Ramhound I had a look at the Event Viewer and did not find any reoccurring events while this is going on. – jwillmer Mar 08 '18 at 11:07
  • Take a look at https://superuser.com/questions/988363/why-do-file-transfers-between-drives-use-ram – iTechieGamer Mar 08 '18 at 11:11
  • Very informative link @iTechieGamer but they speak about 1-3 GB of RAM usage not all available RAM. – jwillmer Mar 08 '18 at 11:39
  • Doesn’t look like you’re moving files to Recycle Bin (it exists per partition, by the way). The dialog says “Deleting”, not “Recycling”. Something is entirely wrong here. – Daniel B Mar 08 '18 at 11:50
  • @DanielB I guess I accepted the popup that the files will be removed immediately since they are too large for the recycle bin. – jwillmer Mar 08 '18 at 11:55
  • @jwillmer - If the answer to your question was to restart File Explorer (i.e. explorer.exe) then you should submit an answer. The solution to your problem should not be contained in the question. Expect that edit to be reverted by a moderator. – Ramhound Mar 08 '18 at 13:43
  • Once your physical RAM is used up, your computer starts paging data to the hard drive. That is the primary disk usage you see. Windows explorer is not efficient at handling file operations with thousands of files and folders. You’re better off going to an administrative command prompt and using rmdir /s <foldername>. Otherwise wait and let it finish. – Appleoddity Mar 08 '18 at 14:01
  • @Ramhound my edit does not solve the question I have. It solved the issue of running out of RAM. – jwillmer Mar 08 '18 at 14:30
  • If nothing else on the drive was important, then I would have just wiped and re-partitioned... – Solar Mike Mar 08 '18 at 14:43
  • analyze the memory usage grow with Windows Performance Analyzer – magicandre1981 Mar 08 '18 at 14:52

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