Windows 10 getting slower and slower running from an HDD

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I am a computer engineer working in the private (home user) sector. So I see a lot of computers using Window 10 – some that I have built and configured and others that were purchased pre-built.

I am increasingly seeing computers that were originally running fine under Windows 10 – but are now getting slower and slower (especially during start-up). The main cause appears to be when the computer is still using an old mechanical Hard Drive. In the worst cases the Task Manager shows the HDD stuck at close to 100% utilisation for extended periods – in some extreme cases (cheap 5400rpm laptop HDD’s) it remains at that level indefinitely.

Obviously no-one should be performing a new Windows install onto a mechanical HDD today – but it now seems that Windows no longer runs acceptably on an HDD. And existing installs are becoming slower and slower.

My impression is that Win10 is getting more and more demanding of the disk access performance – both in general speed and also the ability to process large numbers of small read/writes. I get the impression that more and more background housekeeping and logging tasks have be added to Win10 as each subsequent Feature Update has been released. This results in so many read/write operations being added to the pending HDD queue that it takes a long time to (5-10 minutes) to process them all – and in the worst cases the queue is never cleared, as items are being added faster than they can be processed.

It seems that traditional disk maintenance operations plus the reduction of resident programs, and the disabling of Win10 background tasks (Win10 Telemetry, constant App Updates, file indexing, Win10 live tile updates, Win10 live adverts) is no longer effective in preserving Windows performance at acceptable levels.

The solution is to clone the main HDD over to a replacement SSD – which often fully restores the computer to normal operation with no other changes. Not only do you recover startup times back to an acceptable level (faster than original) but program startup times (eg Google Chrome and Office applications) often become noticeably faster. The Task Manager shows that the SSD “calms down” from 100% utilisation in under 1 minute – when previously an HDD remained at 100% for 10 minutes or longer – and startup to the desktop is often 5x faster.

Task Manager is now the first thing I check when a customer reports their computer id getting slower. Assuming the HDD reports no SMART issues – in almost all cases I now suggest a swap to SSD as the first option – often with a no fix no fee offer.

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How much RAM do these PCs typically have?

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Occasionally only 4GB but most have 8GB. But Task Manger shows that they are not bogging down due to CPU or RAM issues – it is the Disk that is stuck at 100% for long periods.

Obviously you must also do a disk health check (read the SMART data from the drive) to make sure the drive is not having bad sector or communication issues. But in almost all cases the drive appears to be in perfect health – but is just no longer coping with the demands of Win10.

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I’ve recently swapped over drives on 2 laptops.
One approx 10 yrs old with 4 GB ram, the other about 8 yrs old with 8 GB memory.

The difference is quite amazing, truly the best upgrade one can do especially on older HDD’s.

The computers now have extended usefulness.

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Microfix

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Lots of things kick off at boot time. Many products, including Windows, may check for updates and update automatically. Windows maintenance may be started which may include a disk defrag, a Windows Defender scan, telemetry upload, etc.

Over time programs may be inserted into the startup process. Have you monitored that?

Do you regularly run disk cleanup or let Windows do it regularly?

--Joe

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opti1

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@joep517 – Been at this lark (fixing computers) for a long long time now (started in 1987) – so yes all the traditional tidy up and cleanup tricks have been tried. But it seems that Win10 has evolved under our feet to the point where running it on an HDD is becoming annoying even with the better HDD’s (running at 9600rpm with a large cache, and using a SATA 6G connection). And where someone bought a low end laptop a few years ago (with a cheap 5400rpm HDD installed) with Win10 pre-installed – what was originally slow but OK is now getting to be unusable.

The write speeds on some of these cheap HDD’s is very poor for small files (writing less than 16KB of data) – often running at less than 5 MB/sec and sometimes heading for 1 MB/sec. The speeds for large file read/writes is often quoted – and can be 80-100 MB/sec (for 4-16 MB of data). However I think the housekeeping disk tasks generated by Windows tends towards the smaller sizes of data and are thus heavily impacted by the poor performance in this area.

Had one the other day – an Acer Laptop – only 3 years old – but with a very slow 1TB HDD. The Disk stayed between 80% and 100% utilized for 7 minutes after switch on – even after normal cleanup and resident task removal. Put in an SSD and disk was close to 0% by 1 minute 40 seconds – and laptop was actually useable right from arrival at desktop with no serious lagging.

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I’ve not noticed a big performance hit but almost all the machines have SSDs now.

--Joe

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@joep517 Even a basic SATA SSD appears to eliminate the issue I am reporting. I think it may be more than just the basic speed increase – the ability to handle large numbers of small read/write requests may be even more important.

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Telemetry data collection may be responsible for generating those excessive small I/O requests on top of the fairly normal system operations.

Have you noticed if file fragmentation is lower in new version of Windows 10 or 11 on mechanical drives?

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Another thing that can slow things down, especially on slower HDDs, is the Windows Search Indexer.

By default, it starts up at every reboot to “reindex” the contents of your drives (to make searching for things faster) and can take quite a while to complete if running on a slower HDD.

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I’ve taken indexing into account on my SSD based systems, and have mostly disabled it by removing many of the indexed locations from it.

I figure with the random access read speed of SSD, indexing is not as necessary.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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@alegr – I choose which folders are indexed and remove any where I do not find it helpful. (Take a look at Control Panel -> Indexing Options to see which folders your system is indexing). For SSD based systems file indexing is not essential as read/write delays are much reduced – but can still be useful for speeding up search operations.

While the Indexing Service will start at every bootup it should not actually need to do much until new files are added to a monitored folder. So it is incorrect to say that Windows “re-indexes” the content of your drives at every reboot – the only way that could happen is if you were somehow deleting the existing indexes at every shutdown. Plus new files are added individually to existing indexes as part of the normal write operation – on monitored folders. So unless something is mis-configured Windows Indexing should not consume noticeable disk resources unless you add 1000’s of files all at once or force a full reindex.

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JohnW

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I’ve noticed pretty much the same. I despise my weekly maintenance tasks on the ones with spinners. Then add in a fairly large dropbox account and it’s time for dinner and a shower when that baby restarts! 🙂

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DougCuk wrote:

I am increasingly seeing computers that were originally running fine under Windows 10 – but are now getting slower and slower (especially during start-up).

Microsoft knows that too and (probably) will demand OEMs to install Windows 11 on SSDs.

https://hothardware.com/news/when-microsoft-require-ssd-run-windows-11

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windbg

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@DougCuk

I started noticing this Windows 10 disk behavior a few years ago. Like you, I have been at this for more than a few years, so I had not overlooked the obvious stuff. Sysinternals Autoruns is my friend!

Example: I bought a Windows 8.1 laptop with a 1 GB HDD in 2015. Performance was acceptable.

In 2016 or so, I upgraded that laptop to Windows 10, but then I started noticing the continuous disk use by a large number of Windows processes.This was after I had done all of the optimizing and tweaking of Win10 that was recommended.

So I monitored it with Windows Resource Monitor. It seemed that frequent random access disk requests were far more common in the new OS, and the HDD was struggling to cope with the throughput.

Since then, I only use SSD for my boot drives. 🙂

Footnote: I have heard rumors that Microsoft will recommend that OEM’s use SSD boot drives for Windows 11 PC’s. Go figure!

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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@JohnW My minimum spec for any new PC I build or laptop that I recommend is now:
Quad Core CPU, SSD Boot drive, 8GB RAM
I will not put my name to anything less – it is just not worth the hassle of later complaints as to why it is so slow and requests to fix the problem. I agree it is no longer sufficient to run regular maintenance tasks and remove unnecessary resident software – the OS hardware demands on the boot drive are increasing faster than ever before. This issue is I suppose just a reflection of the dramatic evolution of affordable larger SSD drives over the last 5 years.

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windbg

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An assumption that I might make is that current Windows development is probably being done primarily on SSD equipped computers.

 

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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windbg

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DougCuk wrote:

but can still be useful for speeding up search operations.

You don’t need indexing on any drive ssd or hdd. Use the free portable ‘Everything’ app. Search result are instant.

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@Alex5723 – Searches that use a pre-existing index will always be faster than searching without an index – that is just a fact. Other search utilities often build their own indexes for that very reason.

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Might be worth running the command line defrag (before MS get rid of it..) – I’ve had a situation where it seems to fix problem data layouts the GUI version couldn’t be persuaded to (and I’m running SSD but in a hardware supported RAID) and I still have to dive in with DISM occasionally to tidy up the component store if it starts to play up.

I suspect MS are now being a little less careful about how they put data on the drive. With platters drives the firmware on the drive is key – and the cache. Mainly when a drive accesses a sector, the entire physical track is loaded into the cache (as you have to find the index position for the data on the track before starting a read anyway) which means data in sectors on the same track is quicker to access (which is one of the gains defrag tries to make..)

Of course if the operating system just throws data at the drive without care to confine sequential file information to roughly the same area things are going to slow markedly as the drive only has so much cache to work with so whilst it can queue each requested sector if data in the cache, all the seek times soon add up as it has to keep feeding the host side data as well.

As the seek time is virtually zero for a SSD of course the result of the less careful approach will initially be buried in a few milliseconds on an otherwise dazzling performance. It will however bring on the need for SSD firmware and processing to keep up with the change (you might see multi lane memory configurations in the drive rather than single bus, for example – enabling a sort of silicon RAID.. or maybe someone will make a bi-port memory where the same array can be written and read at the same time bar one cycle through different busses running at full processor speeds, with one mother of a custom controller to run the show, who knows…)

I guess we could also see data storage optimisation in the SSD being more if an issue – TRIM might fail to optimise on its own in older drives..

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The issues that I and others are seeing are much worse than anything I have ever seen over the 35 years of my computer experience – so not really a question of disabling un-needed services, clearing temp folders and running defrag. These were the normal tasks that we all used for years to speed up customers and our own computers.

To give an example of the transformation from a recent case I worked on:
Lenovo Laptop purchase in mid 2017 (running Win10 21H2) with a 1TB Seagate HDD
With the original HDD – from switch on to HDD load below 10% took 7 minutes
With the new SATA SSD – from switch on to SSD load below 10% took 1 min 40 seconds
This is with no other changes and was after normal disk maintenance & cleanup tasks.
Shutdown times improved from 30 seconds to 9 seconds.

The worse your HDD specs and interface speed the worse the issue becomes. Laptops with cheaper 5400rpm HDD’s maybe running on SATA 3G are the worst – expensive 9600rpm HDD’s with good size caches and using SATA 6G connections are better. But even the fastest HDD’s are still showing signs of struggling to cope with what Windows is now throwing at the disk – especially on startup. The old standard tweaks are no longer sufficient to retain smooth performance when booting from an HDD.

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Even that 1 minute, 40 seconds is very slow to me.  My Windows 7 machine with the original 7200 rpm HDD boots up in around 45 seconds, and my Linux Mint laptop (with new 250 gig SSD) boots in around 20 seconds.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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@Charlie – I’m not saying the 1min 40sec is anything to boast about – but it is a heck of an improvement on the original 7 minutes. This was a customers laptop that was previously virtually unusable due to the HDD issue combined with the choice of Anti-Virus they had installed and a number of other resident tasks that I was able to disable. It was a low end model with a 2 core / 4 thread CPU running at 2.1GHz – so was never going to be fast whatever I did to it.

For my own computers I have a number of older Intel i5 computers (2nd & 3rd Gen quad core) all now with SATA SSD’s (originally built with HDDD’s) with a mix of Win10 & Win7. Boot times are around 25 sec for Win7 and 30 sec for Win10.

Interestingly I built a PC for a customer last year using an M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD boot drive (running Win10) and it booted to the desktop in 22 seconds – so not much faster than basic SATA 6G SSD systems. So we are obviously reaching a limit at around this level – continuing to increase the boot drive speeds beyond SATA 6G levels doesn’t translate into faster boot times.

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Charlie

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Just encountered another case of Win10 running very slow and the HDD stuck at 100% indefinitely. In this case a higher spec Lenovo Ideapad 520 with an Intel i7-8500 and a 2TB Seagate HDD.

After checking there were no other factors found for the extreme slow running – other than the HDD redlining at 100% utilisation. The final check after all cleanup steps were done and the system restarted – the HDD was still stuck at 100% after 30 minutes with no sign of calming down.

Cloned the HDD to an SSD (both SATA 6G drives) and then swapped the drives – on first boot I ran “Winsat formal” to reset the system performance parameters (makes sure Windows knows it now has a much faster main drive). Win10 now boots to the Desktop (with all icons loaded) in around 30 seconds and the disk utilisation drops sharply shortly after this – and hits 0% after about 90 seconds. And the whole laptop now feels like it should with an i7 CPU (4 core / 8 thread / 1.8GHz).

All this was with 8GB of RAM – but the customer wanted to max out the RAM for architectural CAD work – so it now has 20GB. Unfortunately 4GB was hard soldered on the motherboard with only one slot for add-on RAM – with a max size of 16GB.

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MS is assuming that everyone has an SSD in their computer, and if they don’t well, you had better get one!

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Have to say I see the same thing on a few win7 machines with spinners over the last year or so. Don’t notice it on the few I have with ssd. Maybe it’s just the performance difference and I’ve forgotten how slow spinners are, but dang these few kill me. Despise doing the weekly maintenance on them.

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My thoughts on this:
Start recommending SSD’s in favour of HDD’s to your homeuser clients,
clone/ image OS to new SSD, format old HDD and get the clients to use the redundant HDD as external storage for backips.
(a Sata II controller with a sata III SSD still outperforms HDD’s so that covers a wide spectrum of devices)

POSITIVES:
Your clients will see the noticeable performance boost.
Less device power usage.
Longer battery life (where applicable),
Not prone to data damage from knocks and bumps.
Longevity of internal components due to less internal power loads.

A win, win situation IMHO

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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I have been using SSD boot drives on all new builds and recommendations for the last 2 years or so – and also upgraded all but one of my own PC’s. With the price of SSD’s dropping steadily there is really no justification for any new build not to be using an SSD boot drive – regardless of the issue being discussed in this thread. Win7 doesn’t appear to suffer the dramatic issues I have raised in this thread – but if still using an HDD will appear sluggish compared to a machine using an SSD – one gets used to booting to desktop in 30 seconds.

All my observations of the 100% HDD utilisation via Task Manager are on machines that were bought 4+ years ago when SSD’s were more of a luxury item – and HDD’s were still the standard drive for lower budget systems – and they were working OK with Win10 – maybe booting to Desktop in 60 to 90 seconds. Now those same systems are the ones that are having serious issues. Microsoft have “updated” Win10 with changes that now essentially require and SSD boot drive. So essentially we are having to fix something that Microsoft broke – on computers that were originally performing within acceptable limits but are now heading toward being unusable.

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DougCuk wrote:

I have been using SSD boot drives on all new builds and recommendations for the last 2 years or so – and also upgraded all but one of my own PC’s. With the price of SSD’s dropping steadily there is really no justification for any new build not to be using an SSD boot drive – regardless of the issue being discussed in this thread. Win7 doesn’t appear to suffer the dramatic issues I have raised in this thread

Same here. Recently when I upgraded to a larger SSD in my primary Win10 desktop, I took the older SSD and have it set aside to upgrade the capacity of the boot drive SSD in my Win10 Dell laptop.

Then I will move the existing SSD from my laptop over into an older Win7 desktop that is still running a WD 3.5″ 7200 RPM spinner. Just bought the 2.5″ mounting bracket for that project. That said, I don’t have any particular disk performance issues with that Win7 machine, even though it is an 8 year old Intel i5-3570K 3rd Gen based system, 16GB RAM, with Nvidia GTX 950. I just want to see it fly with an SSD! And then at some point I will probably upgrade it to Win10. It will absolutely need the SSD for that! 🙂

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Been doing some more research on why swapping to an SSD (from an HDD) cures Win10’s recent major slow-down. Most of us look at the much higher data transfer speeds of the SSD and maybe the much lower latency before data is written or read – and assume that these are the only significant advantages.

But there is another hidden performance boost with using an SSD – they have a much higher IOPS rating (input/output operations per second). IOPS measures the ability of a given storage solution to process read and write commands – measured as operations per second. Generally HDD’s will have an IOPS range of 55-180, while SSD’s have an IOPS ranging from 3,000 to 500,000. Some of the newer PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD’s can reach 800,000 IOPS for random reads and up to 600,000 IOPS for random writes.

So as I suspected the performance advantage of SSD’s over HDD’s is not just the faster data transfer rate – but maybe more importantly an SSD can process more read/write operations per second – anywhere from 20x to 4000x greater. This is what I think is the major issue with Win10 – the deluge of small read/write requests due to it’s incessant background tasks.

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wavy, satrow, JohnW, windbg, Charlie

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DougCuk wrote:

So as I suspected the performance advantage of SSD’s over HDD’s is not just the faster data transfer rate – but maybe more importantly an SSD can process more read/write operations per second – anywhere from 20x to 4000x greater. This is what I think is the major issue with Win10 – the deluge of small read/write requests due to it’s incessant background tasks.

You make a very good point!

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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DougCuk

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I’ve started disabling prefetch (SysMain svc) on mechanical drives. Just did one 2 days ago and client says performance has improved drastically. No other changes made.

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Just another Forum Poster, satrow

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Been doing that for many years and haven’t encountered any problems.

BTW, SysMain is superfetch not prefetch.

To also disable prefetch, open regedit and go to the following key.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Change the value of EnablePrefetcher to

You can also change the value of the EnableSuperfetch to 0 but, if SysMain is disabled, it’s value doesn’t really matter.

Once Prefetch is disabled, you can delete all the files in the C:\Windows\Prefetch folder.

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satrow

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@alejr You are correct, superfetch. I don’t disable prefetch as I think that actually helps improve performance. I do occasionally clear the prefetch files when doing maintenance.

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@cyberSAR In the cases you have seen does “Service Host: SysMain” show up in Task Manager as a high percentage Disk utilisation? I always check Task Manager to look for what process or service may be originating the high Disk utilisation – but have never identified Sysmain as a possible candidate. Always appears to be just a random assortment of “Host Processes” and other Windows system tasks. I shall try testing this Sysmain option when I next encounter a case of this type.

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Yes it has, especially after a reboot which is expected, but seemed to last forever which is why I tried disabling it. After doing so on a couple systems and getting good reports back I’ve started doing on more.

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@cyberSAR – I will certainly look out for this as a potential factor and then fix – and would be much faster and less expensive than a replacement disk. Obviously fitting an SSD has a wide range of additional benefits – mainly the faster load times of Windows and Applications – and when replacing older HDD’s you gain a new extended life-span for the main disk.

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SSD is certainly the way to go. I haven’t had my OS on a spinner in many years. Even old machines that came with XP have been upgraded to 10 with SSD are still usable for many. I just have a few clients that are reluctant or unable to change the drive for various reasons. For those, this has been seeming to help. Still no speed demon but at least more functional for them.

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