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I just bought my very first internal SSD and installed it into my desktop PC. I was running out of disk space and want to use it for data storage. The OS is installed on the first disk, which is a standard (spinning) HDD.

This is what Samsung Magician is showing me:

Drive Details

Performance Benchmark

Firmware

So "on paper", everything seems to look great. However, when I'm trying to move files from my HDD to the SSD, I'm only getting about 50-70 MB/s. I assumed that the bottleneck here is the speed limit of the HDD read access...

What I don't understand is why this bogs down my whole system. I would expect Windows 7 to be smart enough not to allow itself freeze up during simple file transfer operations. Also, the PC has 32 GB RAM and a 3,4 GHz 12-core CPU, so it's not exactly slow.

What might be the problem here? The system gets so slow that I cannot even open Firefox while moving files. Shouldn't the system somehow manage the amount of resources processes can take and put a cap on it in order to ensure stability? Is there some setting that I could change to address the issue?

Unfortunately, I have little to no experience managing Windows systems. I know that in Linux one can impose custom limits on the resource usage of individual processes. However, file I/O seems something rather fundamental so I'd expect this to be efficiently managed by the OS.

Please help, the setup is not usable in this state...

PS.: I don't want to migrate the system to the SSD as I don't trust Windows with my data. The data should be stored on a separate drive, which is why I got the SSD in the first place. But this should not slow down my system on the HDD.

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    Move your system to the SSD. Everything else is a waste.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Nov 26, 2020 at 9:21
  • @DanielB Thanks for your suggestion! Can I do this just by copy & pasting everything from within Windows (i.e. select all folders in C:\ and copy them over to D:\, the latter being the SSD)? The thing is that the PC is being used for data acquisition and has lots of custom software on it, so I cannot afford to just set up a new system and reinstall everything (as I'd be risking to break something - never change a running system)
    – david
    Commented Nov 26, 2020 at 9:25
  • No. Look into disk cloning. Macrium Reflect seems to be a popular choice, there's also Clonezilla which is my tool of choice and a lot of other products.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Nov 26, 2020 at 10:15
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    Welcome of the wonderful world of Windows and it's lousy resource management and even worse file-manager. Use a better file-manager. Explorer is pretty hopeless and a resource hog all by itself. TotalCommander or TeraCopy or DirOpus, just to name a few, will copy/move faster and with less blocking resources. (But you can't avoid that alltogether in Windows. That is just the way it is.) Anyway... Keeping the OS on HDD is stupid. Move everything to the SSD. That makes a lot more sense. Consider using the old HDD as extra datadisk later, but move the OS to the SSD.
    – Tonny
    Commented Nov 26, 2020 at 12:38
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    This can be done quite safely on a working system. There are many drive cloning programs such as Macrium Reflect, Easus, Clonezilla and so on and a good few of them can work on a live system without problems and in the past I have literally connected a new via USB, cloned the disk from the live OS, then powered down and unplugged the existing HDD and literally put the SSD in place. The HDD can be plugged back in later or wiped and used as a data disk. Samsung even provide migration tools for you at samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Nov 26, 2020 at 15:08

2 Answers 2

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So, to answer the question of why it drags everything to hell.

So "on paper", everything seems to look great. However, when I'm trying to move files from my HDD to the SSD, I'm only getting about 50-70 MB/s. I assumed that the bottleneck here is the speed limit of the HDD read access...

That’s exactly right.

What I don't understand is why this bogs down my whole system.

That is because you are loading the disk 100%. It is squeezing out every bit of read speed it can offer. The target drive is just so much faster.

Windows will start to hang a lot when the system drive (and perhaps drives with page files) is excessively loaded, because it now competes for I/O bandwidth. Even if Windows inserts its own I/O operations into the queue, the drive is still super busy in total. In fact, on a mechanical hard drive, more seeking will reduce performance even further.

All this is much less severe on SSDs, because they offer vastly superior random access performance (well over 100 times faster on decent SSDs), even compared to the fastest enterprise HDDs. That means equal distribution of I/O bandwidth is much more feasible.

You absolutely should migrate your operating system to the SSD. You can still use separate partitions for Windows and whatever other data you have.

Maybe just get another SSD because you will not want to use your HDD anymore.

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Yep, your HDD is fully saturated servicing the file copy since the SSD can handle anything the HDD can throw at it (and more :). plus it has to actually seek back and forth from the data that is being copied and the programs/files you're trying to access...

As a workaround, try a file copier that supports throttling local file transfer speeds, like FastCopy or lowering the I/O priority of the process that is copying the file with something like Process Hacker.

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