Problem deleting files

[Guest PeteOlcott]

I needed to delete about 2.7 GB of 500,000 files yesterday and it

seemed that it was taking far too long. I was deleting these files

using the command prompt. I opened another command prompt to measure

the progress by seeing how much free space became available every

minute. It was only about 2 MB, thus the system was only deleting

about 370 files per minute. At this rate it would take more than 22

hours to complete. I ended up reformatting the drive because this

would take only 25 minutes.

 

Does anyone have any idea whether or not deleting 500,000 files of an

average of 5 KB each should take more than 22 hours on a fast quad-

core sata drive machine? What could have been going on?