I recently got a semi-new desktop from my company’s office closure. It has two 500GB HDDs, but I removed the second one since it didn’t have the OS. I wiped and left that second drive unformatted. Using some fairly recent parts I had (Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3060, B550 motherboard from 2021), I built a new PC with that HDD as the main drive housing Windows. However, this new build is painfully slow—apps take 30 seconds to a minute to open, the Windows start menu is super laggy, and some apps don’t even load properly, forcing me to restart. RAM speed checks out fine in BIOS, and the HDD tests showed it’s healthy. The original company desktop with that same HDD runs really fast, almost like my rig with an M.2 SSD. I’m wondering if it’s possibly corrupt Windows files or something else causing this huge slowdown? Any ideas?
4 Answers
If you don’t have an SSD handy yet, you can try using a USB flash drive as ReadyBoost to speed up program loading. It’s not as fast as an SSD but might help a bit until you swap drives.
Most likely the main bottleneck here is the HDD itself. Even if the drive shows as healthy, mechanical HDDs just aren’t built for fast OS and app loading like SSDs are. If you check Task Manager under the Processes tab and look at the Disk usage, it’s probably pegged at 100% most of the time which means it’s struggling to keep up. Swapping in a SATA SSD instead of the HDD usually fixes this kind of sluggishness entirely.
It mostly comes down to having your OS installed on an HDD. HDDs are just much slower than SSDs when it comes to reading and writing data rapidly. Even fairly modern HDDs can slow down loading times tremendously compared to SSDs.
That’s a bummer but makes sense. I guess I’ll have to suck it up and grab an SSD for the build.
You could try running a disk benchmark tool like CrystalDiskMark to see how your HDD is performing, but keep in mind HDD performance often degrades with use and age. Most people recommend moving to an SSD to get a noticeable speed bump beyond what HDDs can offer.
I’m not going to bother with that since I’m hearing SSDs are just the way to go. Seems like replacing the HDD will be the easiest fix.
Yea, that’s what I’m hearing from everyone. I’ll just replace it with an SSD and see if that sorts things out.