Win 10 - HDD is unbearably slow

Question

Since the upgrade from Win8.1 to Win10, the HDD of my laptop became unbearably slow. Please look at these transfer speeds:

0.3MB/sec????? Floppy drives had such a transfer rate. :)

The laptop is 6 months old, a Lenovo Yoga core i5. The HDD is Western Digital Blue UltraSlim 500GB (WD5000MPCK) type. All drivers are up to date (according to Device Manager). I have ESET Nod32 virus scanner installed.

I turned off Windows write-cache buffer flushing as recommended here, but that did not help. Do you have any advice?

UPDATE:

Symptoms: After upgrade to Win10, the laptop became unbearably slow using 100% HDD all the time. After restart, I have to leave the laptop unattended for approx 5-10 minutes, until the HDD catches up and have some breath.

Tried (and failed) treatments: I turned off indexing service to lower HDD load, I did de-fragmenting, none helped.

Measurable issues: The laptop is unable to play back HD videos taken by mobile phone (6 min = 1.2GB) because of HDD starvation. Pendrive transfer rate of huge video files is steady 6MB/sec (same pendrive on other laptop showed 23MB/s).

Answer 1

A clean install of Win 10 has solved the speed problem.

Answer 2

Your results look fine, perhaps a little slower than the benchmarks here, but still well over an acceptable range.

These are my results for the same test on my HDD:

and my SSD:

The non sequential tests on a hard drive are inherently slow due to the long seek times on traditional hard drives. There are very noticeable latency issues when not dealing with sequential access, which is why defragmenting a hard drive can make a huge difference to performance. Further reading on these tests can be found here.

As for your actual performance issues - what have you actually noticed other than the benchmarks? After the upgrade your drive may be fragmented and it could be worth defragmenting, but your benchmarks don't look too bad at all.