Very slow ssd

deshepherd · 24 Mar 2025 at 21:50

My son visited this weekend and brought his PC for me to look at as it was turning on and shutting down very slowly. Looking at perfmon I noticed that his second Nvme drive (2TB Kingston) was reporting constant 100% activity with very little data transfer and then going to resource monitor I saw that reporting response time of 1000s of ms.
After trying various things I discovered that he never installed chipset drivers when he built the PC and installed windows (originally win10 which has upgraded itself to win11) so I did this and after a couple of reboots everything seemed to be ok (startup and shutdown in a few seconds rather than 5-10 mins) so he went home thinking of fixed it.
However could have days later he says it's gone back to where it was with 100% activity on the 2nd ssd and very slow startup/shutdown.
Health reports on the ssd showed no issues.
Anyone got any ideas what the problem and/or solution could be?
Nb originally the PC worked fine ... this slowness has only happened in the last few weeks.

Meddling-Monk · 24 Mar 2025 at 21:54

My feeling is either it's Malware, or there's a hardware fault. It shouldn't be a chipset driver issue.

deshepherd · 24 Mar 2025 at 22:02

He's just reseated the SSD (as that was one of the next things I'd said I would try next before it seemed to start to work correctly again) plus also did a firmware update (strange as when I checked the Kingston SSD manager tool said no updates were available!) and it seems to be back to working normally again.

Tetras · 24 Mar 2025 at 22:12

What model is this?

deshepherd · 24 Mar 2025 at 22:48

I think it was an NV2 ... and is already gone back to 100% active again. Quick google of the drive indicates it seems its only plus point was "very cheap"

Meddling-Monk · 24 Mar 2025 at 23:24

How full was the drive? If it's near capacity, even well respected drives act funny.

mattyfez · 24 Mar 2025 at 23:36

Meddling-Monk said:
How full was the drive? If it's near capacity, even well respected drives act funny.

This...also whats actually using the disk (in resource monitor you can click the read or write column to see whats using a lot)

deshepherd · 25 Mar 2025 at 09:30

Think the drive was around 80-90% full.
From resource monitor all the accesses to that drive had response times on the 1000s of ms Vs single or low double digits for the main sdd

deshepherd · 25 Mar 2025 at 09:44

Just checked and it was just under 90% full. He'd also found something online suggesting that this could be the issue and deleted stuff to get it down to 80% full and I think it's working better.

mattyfez · 25 Mar 2025 at 10:41

deshepherd said:
Just checked and it was just under 90% full. He'd also found something online suggesting that this could be the issue and deleted stuff to get it down to 80% full and I think it's working better.

Yeah they do say to keep x space free on SSDs
I can't remember the exact technical reasons but if you Google it you'll find an explanation.

darael · 25 Mar 2025 at 14:06

Get your son to uninstall any games he hasn't played in the last couple of months. Then run disk clean-up as admin, tick everything and delete.

If the above frees up quite a lot of space, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to run Windows defrag to force the drive to run it's garbage collection routine. Don't do this very often though, if it all, just as a one off, otherwise you can shorten the life of the drive.

Tetras · 25 Mar 2025 at 14:13

deshepherd said:
Just checked and it was just under 90% full. He'd also found something online suggesting that this could be the issue and deleted stuff to get it down to 80% full and I think it's working better.

deshepherd said:
I think it was an NV2 ... and is already gone back to 100% active again. Quick google of the drive indicates it seems its only plus point was "very cheap"

Aye, NV2 is not a great drive (well, it can be anything, since Kingston don't guarantee the parts).

With QLC drives (NV2 is likely to be QLC), they get very slow to write when the SLC cache is used up and if they have a dynamic cache, filling the drive will prevent it from operating at full speed.

They also need time to recover after large writes.

alec · 25 Mar 2025 at 15:03

trim was never mentioned here
could be that automatic defrag/optimisation was turned off or unable to run on that drive from that chipset driver issue
and even if there was 10% free space, drive itself didn't know which bits are free to rotate usage. And kept itself busy rotating the 3 remaining bits it thought were free

deshepherd · 2 Apr 2025 at 13:19

Just heard that my son contacted Kingston support and they've agreed to send him a replacement drive as the existing one was still in warranty.

sityeuropa · Thursday at 16:54

deshepherd said:
My son visited this weekend and brought his PC for me to look at as it was turning on and shutting down very slowly. Looking at perfmon I noticed that his second Nvme drive (2TB Kingston) was reporting constant 100% activity with very little data transfer and then going to resource monitor I saw that reporting response time of 1000s of ms.
After trying various things I discovered that he never installed chipset drivers when he built the PC and installed windows (originally win10 which has upgraded itself to win11) so I did this and after a couple of reboots everything seemed to be ok (startup and shutdown in a few seconds rather than 5-10 mins) so he went home thinking of fixed it.
However could have days later he says it's gone back to where it was with 100% activity on the 2nd ssd and very slow startup/shutdown.
Health reports on the ssd showed no issues.
Anyone got any ideas what the problem and/or solution could be?
Nb originally the PC worked fine ... this slowness has only happened in the last few weeks.

Ensure Write Cache is enabled on the drive from Device Manager?

I forgot I had this disabled on mine and had slowness and freezing.