By
Delia
/ Last
update
December 20, 2021
Have you noticed any SSD slowdown after upgrading to Windows 11, especially NVMe SSDs?
Many users reported slower NVMe speeds
Over the past few months, many Windows 11 users have reported NVMe SSD slowdowns on Reddit, Microsoft Support, and other forums. They are not actually new. Reports of this issue date back several months when Windows 11 was still in preview, but the complaints are still there two months after release.
With the CrystalDiskMark (SSD testing software) test data posted by MJ_JasonM, Windows 11 performance can be several times slower than NVMe drives in some cases. While the difference in sequential read and write performance is small, 4K random writes in Win11 actually dropped from 2320MB/s in Win10 to just 983MB/s.
The root cause of the problem is not yet clear, but some possible reasons have emerged. One thing users initially pointed out was that virtualization-based security (VBS) was causing SSD performance to drop, but that doesn't make up for the full difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11.
There was also a Samsung SSD user who reported a 75% shrinkage in random read speeds under Win11, which he later found out was related to the drive containing the Windows 11 installation. If you run the benchmark on a secondary drive, the results will match the advertised values for SSDs.
Windows 11 22000.348 has slightly improved SSD performance
In fact, a member of the Microsoft file system team on Reddit said he was looking into this issue, but two months later, the problem still persists. Despite recent reports that the latest Windows 11 update, version 22000.348, has slightly improved SSD performance, it still falls far short of performance on Windows 10.
Previously, the Windows 11 AMD processor performance degradation and some applications not running issues have been gradually fixed, so hopefully the NVMe SSD performance will also be improved soon.