I have a laptop that came with Win 7 (the HDD is on SATA II). About a year ago, I installed a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB (cloned the data from the HDD). It worked beautifully (always <5s boot time). A few months later, I auto-upgraded to Win 10. Everything still worked great (as far as the SSD is concerned; obviously I had a few usual Win 10 headaches).
Two days ago, I wiped the drive (using a Secure Erase bootable CD made by Samsung Magician) and fresh installed Win 10 (1511 build). Now the entire machine is sloow (>1min boot time, frequent lagging, etc. -- nothing like the performance I've been seeing for the past year.) Updating all of the drivers did nothing to improve that.
I have wiped and reinstalled again, and it still didn't fix it. I am fairly sure that the drive is causing the problems; it mostly lags when the "drive access" light is illuminated.
I have found many pieces of advice discussing issues that can occur with SSDs and Windows 10; usually a fresh install is the solution, not the problem.
Additional info:
- In Task Manager, Disk is stuck at >95%, even with total I/O at less than 1MB/s.
- I used the same Samsung Magician Secure Erase and Windows Installer boot drives for another Win 10 install on another computer, and they both worked fine.
- In Samsung Magician performance test, seq. read is 553 MB/s and seq. write is 88 MB/s. I watched the Resource Monitor; Read never went over 1MB/s, but Write went up to 200MB/s. What is happening here?