Win10, Primary Drive, AHCI vs RAID, and verifying display adapter?

selden said:

If you haven't already, you should update the laptop's BIOS to the most recent version. If the laptop was unused, it probably still has the original BIOS, which might have bugs limiting its performance.

It also wouldn't hurt to use a disk diagnostic program to inspect the SSD's SMART status. The slowness might be due to disk problems. I use CrystalDiskInfo, which is free. People often use CrystalDiskMark to measure disk performance.

Good suggestion

Thanks for the suggestions.

NavyLCDR said:

What does the performance tab on task manager say for available memory?

Performance tabs says 8gb and no problems.

selden said:

If you haven't already, you should update the laptop's BIOS to the most recent version. If the laptop was unused, it probably still has the original BIOS, which might have bugs limiting its performance.
It also wouldn't hurt to use a disk diagnostic program to inspect the SSD's SMART status. The slowness might be due to disk problems. I use CrystalDiskInfo, which is free. People often use CrystalDiskMark to measure disk performance.

I downloaded the lasted BIOS from Dell (A26 6/30/19) for this machine, but discovered this already has it.

spunk said:

An SSD can get Bad Sectors just like a HDD can.
You can also run Crucial's own SSD diagnostic software

Thanks for the link. I downloaded the Crucial program and it found the disk in good condition. The only negative thing was that there was no "Over Provisioning" partition. I followed instructions, and made one but no real change. I also went into the BIOS and switched off all the things related to throttling or performance reductions to save battery. The machine is still unusable as it is.

Although the SSD's diagnostics say it's OK, what's its actual throughput? It should max at about 500 MBytes/sec. As I mentioned previously, CrystalDiskMark is a popular I/O benchmark program. See CrystalDiskMark – Crystal Dew World The examples at the bottom of that page (6K MB/sec) are for PCIe v4 NVMe SSDs.

Substantially less than 500 MB/sec for large, sequential reads would indicate a problem either in the SATA interface of the motherboard or the SSD. About 250 MB/sec is usually seen for SATA2 and somewhat over 500 for SATA3. (See All You Need to Know about the SATA Interface | Delkin Devices ).

From your description of the symptoms, it'll probably be far less than that. This might be due to lost interrupts, with the system timing out and having to retry, perhaps more than once. If you have another SSD you can try, that'd help indicate if it's a problem on the motherboard (if it's still slow) or in that particular SSD (if the new one is fast).