Plus the indexer was relentless and just smashed HDDs.

I'll second the issues with the indexer. I disabled it for every disk I had because the additional I/O load for disks was ridiculous. I remember benchmarking game launches with it enabled and disabled to see how much of a difference there would be, and I saw some games take a full minute less to load into a playable state.

I don't know if I just had more files than the average consumer or what, but they didn't anticipate the load under certain scenarios.