Purpose of Pinning, if Explorer always freezes?

[Bowsa]

Is there an actual purpose to pinning? For all intents and purposes it should behave as responsive as any other file, until you need to access said file.

But most of the time, accessing the drive or certain folders freezes Windows Explorer for a few seconds. Isn't pinning supposed to prevent this?

[srcrist]

That can be caused by issues with any file system filter, and even explorer shell extensions. You'll need to troubleshoot the exact cause. One example: if you open a directory of media files, Windows, by default, wants to read certain information from those files for the file properties in explorer. That data is not pinned; it actually has to read some of the file. I believe that functionality can be disabled if it's a problem. 

Also, pinned data will prevent the file system data from having to be retrieved from your cloud provider, yes. But pinned data can also be discarded if your cache is too full as well, so keep an eye on that. 

You can test the actual responsiveness of the file system by using a command prompt, which will not try to load any extension or filter data when browsing the file system.