Windows 11 is reportedly slowing down some SSDs

Ashwin
Dec 7, 2021
Windows 11 News
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20

It has been two months since Windows 11 was released to users, but the operating system has had its fair share of bad publicity, especially when it comes to the performance. And now, reports are emerging that claim the operating system is slowing down some SSDs.

Windows 11 is reportedly slowing down some SSDs
A thread at the Microsoft community forums, spotted by Neowin, has complaints from several users who say their SSD's performance has degraded significantly after upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Image credit: Microsoft forums.

The users have shared screenshots that show the benchmark results from drive measurement tools such as CrystalDiskMark, Samsung Magician, etc. You can tell simply by looking at the images, that there is a problem. The screenshots reveal that the random write speeds have halved in Windows 11, in comparison to benchmarks taken on Windows 10.

Interestingly, the majority of these complaints have one more thing in common, the issue seems to be prevalent among users with Samsung NVMe SSDs. Some comments at the forums indicate that the issue does not affect Intel Optane SSDS.

Another theory rules out the possibility of VBS (Virtualization Based Security) affecting the performance, since the option was disabled before taking the benchmark. Some users have claimed that disabling the option has improved their system's speed, you can optionally try it by going to Windows Security > Device Security > Core Isolation, and toggle the setting for Memory Integrity. You may also want to turn off the Animation Effects under the Accessibility options in the Settings app.

Another couple of threads posted at the Microsoft Feedback Hub, and on Reddit, have many users discussing the issue. This problem hasn't popped up just now, it seems to have been around for 3 months or so. That is well before Windows 11 was released, which means Microsoft did not address the concern while the operating system was in the preview phase, and shipped it as is. The users appear to be on the stable channel of the operating system, and the consensus is that there is a bug in Windows 11 that affects the performance of SSDs. It is either that, or some bad drivers that are causing the issue.

Some users say that the recent Windows Update KB5007262 (which is a preview update) has improved their computer's performance. If you are facing similar issues, maybe that is something that you could try.

My computer does not have an NVMe SSD, nor do I have benchmarks to compare the result with, but I can understand that such a massive performance degradation can be frustrating. While I have no issues running games on my computer, I have noticed that Windows 11 is slow in certain areas, e.g. File Explorer, or the right-click menu on the Desktop, sometimes files take a split second longer than they should to open. There is a very noticeable lag in both situations, in what used to be an otherwise smooth experience in Windows 10. One of my friends restored his PCs to Windows 10 after realizing his system was slower,  but more importantly due to some incompatibilities with Visual Studio.

Performance issues could deter users from upgrading from Windows 10 to 11, you can't blame them for wanting to stick with a tried and tested software. Microsoft needs to address this problem if it hopes to convince more users to adopt the new operating system.

How is your SSD performance on Windows 11?

Summary
Windows 11 is slowing down some SSDs
Article Name
Windows 11 is slowing down some SSDs
Description
Is your computer slow after upgrading to Windows 11? You're not alone, many users say their NVME SSDs are performing slower with the new OS.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. EP said on December 15, 2021 at 1:06 am
    Reply

    from Born’s Tech and Windows World blog – Windows 11: Microsoft fixes NVMe SSD Performance Issue
    https://borncity.com/win/2021/12/13/windows-11-microsoft-korrigiert-ssd-leistungsproblem/

    MS support article 5007262 was updated a few days ago to point out the following:
    https://support.microsoft.com/help/5007262

    “Fixes an issue that affects the performance of all disks (NVMe, SSD, Hardisk) on Windows 11 by performing unnecessary actions on every write. This issue only occurs when the NTFS USN journal is enabled. Note that the USN journal is always enabled on the C: disk.”

  2. ULBoom said on December 8, 2021 at 6:25 pm
    Reply

    Another fix for the Win 11 born yesterday team.

  3. Tony said on December 8, 2021 at 3:35 pm
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    I always turn off the Sysmain service and disable it (formerly Superfetch). It likes to keep disk usage high.

  4. windozii said on December 8, 2021 at 11:05 am
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    No worries as long it do not fry the motherboard or trip the circuit breaker computer is plugged in.

  5. Dumbledalf said on December 8, 2021 at 8:44 am
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    Speed feels the same to me compared to Windows 10.

  6. Leonard said on December 8, 2021 at 5:08 am
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    Microsoft as always helping Intel and hurting other technology companies.

  7. Steve S. said on December 8, 2021 at 12:24 am
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    Couple this with Samsung having changed to an apparently slower controller on their SSD’s earlier this year (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/samsung-seemingly-caught-swapping-components-in-its-970-evo-plus-ssds/) — plus all the other “rubbish” changes in Win 11, I’ll be sticking to Win 10 for now.

  8. Anonymous said on December 8, 2021 at 12:23 am
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    Windows 11 is a junk made by losers. Its failed Windows 10X inside 10.

  9. Graham said on December 7, 2021 at 8:14 pm
    Reply

    Are the slower SSDs based on older hardware models?
    Considering the newer software has higher demands, wouldn’t it make sense for these older models to be slower?

    1. Anonymous said on December 8, 2021 at 12:58 am
      Reply

      No, as usual with MS marketing Win 11 was claimed by MS to run better than 10 on the same hardware. There’s not much new in 11, other than TPM. Maybe they’ve increased the amount of spying Defender or some other service does. If it is more aggressive in realtime monitoring it could interfere with a lot of things, especially storage access.

      Win 11 had another bug where it crippled AMD hardware, slowing down by 15%. How does this company stay in business?

  10. JohnIL said on December 7, 2021 at 8:01 pm
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    Hard to say how widespread this problem is. I have noticed most benchmark comparisons between Win 10 and Win 11 are basic a wash. Seems to me Win 11 is just Windows 10 with a fresh UI. Might as well stick with Windows 10 at least for awhile until Microsoft can work out the bugs.

  11. Yuliya said on December 7, 2021 at 7:25 pm
    Reply

    I remember hearing out that Win11 storage performance is supposed to be better than W10. Now I’m quite curious to find out myself. I have two Samsung 980 Pro 1TB which I can test.

    1. Yuliya said on December 7, 2021 at 11:51 pm
      Reply

      https://i.imgur.com/m1taYF7.png

      Both operating systems ran under the same circumstances, same temperature (30-33″ Celsius), and using High performance power plan. Do note that a few hundred MB/s difference (yeah hundred, lmao) can actually be seen on a run to run under the same conditions, so I would not worry too much about that – you can get 3500MB/s on one run and 3100MB/s on another, and it’s fine.

      However, that random write (W10 2900MB/s, W11 1200MB/s), is always half the speed on Windows 11 vs Windows 10. Also, drive D:/ is almost full, note how Windows 11 does not like it at all, write performance goes down the drain, whereas on Windows 10 performance is better maintained.

      Both C:/ and D:/ are the same drive, they will score the same when empty (I will not format drive D:/ to prove that, come on..).

      There is absolutely no difference with the KB5007262 installed.

      I have my reasons to believe that this storage performance will remain throughout Windows 11’s lifespan and MS cannot do anything about it, so don’t expect any update to address anything. There isn’t anything to address to begin with. It will be interesting to see some benchmarks when games start using DirectStorage on both W10 and W11.

      Also, VBS was disabled on all instances. All CPU mitigations (Spectre/Meltdown) were disabled as well, using Microsoft’s guidelines. Windows Defender was completely disabled and all “Exploit mitigations” were as well disabled, with the only exception being DEP, which cannot be disabled for 64-bit processes. Indexer and other background maintenance tasks were as well disabled – they would not run even if the PC was left to idle for 24 hours.

    2. Anonymous said on December 7, 2021 at 8:05 pm
      Reply

      Depends how you define ‘better’.

  12. microfix said on December 7, 2021 at 6:59 pm
    Reply

    Sorry. there are more important things for the corporate heirarchy to concentrate on such as emojis, iconification and visual appaul or is that appeal? /facepalm

  13. Richard Allen said on December 7, 2021 at 6:50 pm
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    I can only imagine how annoyed I would be to lose random write speed on my NVMe drive after “upgrading” to Win11 and then having to go back to Win10 to get back the performance I originally paid for. I vaguely remember some websites talking up the performance advantages of Win11 and I can’t help but wonder… what happened?!

    I personally want to thank all the Microsoft beta testers out there and in the meantime I’ll continue to use gpedit to lock in the version I want to stay on, 21H1 for now. At least Microsoft has almost four years to get the bugs worked out before Win10 end of life. ;)

  14. common sense computing said on December 7, 2021 at 6:47 pm
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    Look out, the Win 11 users/bootlickers are lurking and will insult you instead of providing one good reason to use it.

    1. Anonymous said on December 7, 2021 at 8:02 pm
      Reply

      1) locked into using it due to being a programmer who uses calls to Windows DLLs. The overhead to change is too high. Write programs in Linux, the target market shrinks ENORMOUSLY.

    2. John G. said on December 7, 2021 at 7:23 pm
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      None yours.

  15. John G. said on December 7, 2021 at 5:19 pm
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    I wrote some comments about this fact some time ago in Ghacks. In W10 a complete overwrite of my SSD was 15 minutes long so far, and now with W11 it takes almost a 30 minutes, almost the double of time spent in a basic write operation. Now SSD seems slower with big files too. Thanks @Ashwin. :[

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