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Re:Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow? by richij on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @08:14AM (#24119487)
Symptoms could easily indicate a disk problem, rather than a Windows problem. You might have a defective sector that's difficult to read, in an important place in the filesystem that Windows often needs to read.

Typical consumer drives have long error timeouts, during which they will try and try and try again to read a defective sector. Assuming it eventually succeeds, no error gets flagged anywhere—not even in the SMART data.

Re:Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow? by nix23 on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @10:22AM (#24120526)
>Symptoms could easily indicate a disk problem, rather than a Windows problem

Exactly what i was thinking, a HDD could be still really fast but heavy fragmentation, background scanning (antivirus or Automatic Maintenance(the task)) or a defect HDD could slow thing really down.

Re:Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow? by quercusa on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:53PM (#24125854)
One way to spot disk-related issues: In Task Manager/Resource Monitor, watch the 'Disk Queue Length'. It should stay below 1.00 except in extreme circumstances such as running a backup.
Re:Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow? by Imanari on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @06:50PM (#24126914)
How do you spot and fix disk problems apart from checking the Disk Queue Length as mentioned below?
Re:Ask HN: Why is windows 10 atrociously slow? by jituc on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @02:43AM (#24129196)
Use event viewer, go to windows system logs and look for errors marked with disk tag and bad sector message.

This is the way I have pre-diagnoised my last three hdd way before problem surface.