Slow IO Operations but Benchmark Says SSD Fast

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I have a laptop (HP ENVY x360) that is only a year old. It has 16GB of RAM, an Intel-i7 7500u 7th Gen, and a Samsung PCI Express 512GB SSD. When I read/write to the drive, it hangs for a second or two unless I'm flying through a lot of files then it can read quickly. It's almost like it needs to warm up to work properly. I ran a speed benchmark on it and everything showed up fine. I also disabled write caching which I was told may speed it up (I don't see why though). It's a Win 10 laptop running the latest build.

Does anyone have any ideas on what may be slowing it down? I have an SSD on my other machine as well but that's over a normal SATA port and it flies 24/7. Is PCI Express v4 not a fast interface/iffy?

Phillip McMullen

Posted 2018-09-19T03:03:35.160

Reputation: 33

2What are you reading and writing to the drive? It’s really hard to quantify what you are experiencing based on your description. And speed truly is a relative term. – Appleoddity – 2018-09-19T04:06:24.577

If you are having trouble only when writing to the drive then it suggests that TRIM might not be working properly. You can check it is enabled and see if your manufacturer has a tool to manually trim the drive, more info at https://www.digitalcitizen.life/simple-questions-what-trim-ssds-why-it-useful

– Mokubai – 2018-09-19T06:58:12.183

@Appleoddity Any file is causing the issue. For example, I just saved an excel file and it locked the UI for a few seconds while it completed the save. It doesn't seem to cause it as much if it's saving to an existing file, mainly when creating a new one – Phillip McMullen – 2018-09-19T22:21:27.887

@Mokubai I checked and TRIM is activated based on the command prompt query – Phillip McMullen – 2018-09-19T22:24:49.787

There are technically a few reasons Excel might be delayed when saving or loading a file. Have you experienced the issue with basic copying of files, or saving a file from a non-office program? For one thing, if you have OneDrive or your office programs connected to a Microsoft account the files are saved and loaded online first. Not from disk. – Appleoddity – 2018-09-20T00:09:00.380

@Appleoddity Yea, excel was just an example. I'll have the same problem with saving a document in Notepad, saving in Visual Studio, opening projects in Visual Studio, etc. It's like it's slow to read if its been inactive for a while. – Phillip McMullen – 2018-09-20T08:04:28.713

Answers

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To resolve this question (not really an answer per-say), the issue has gone away after a full wipe of the laptop. I think it was possibly a bad driver from the start (refurbished laptop wiped by manufacturer). I just got the laptop running with the basic settings (no specific drivers installed other than the ones Win10 found on it's own) and the drive is accessing files much faster (used to peak around 6MBPS, now averages 100MBPS while opening programs). Benchmark reads much higher as well.

Phillip McMullen

Posted 2018-09-19T03:03:35.160

Reputation: 33

Asked: 2018-09-19T03:03:35.160

Viewed: 84 times

Active: 2018-09-25T00:45:21.537