Windows 7 - Intermittent but Extreme SSD Lag

I'm having a weird lag issue that is fairly random and hard to reproduce but very crippling when it happens. Despite a good amount of research I have yet to solve the issue. Any ideas are appreciated!

What: My computer becomes almost completely unresponsive and any process takes AGES to finish. Sometimes the program I'm currently using is fine but trying to do anything else, including ctrl+alt+delete, takes ~1 minute or more to respond. The hard drive indicator blinks on and off steadily but is primarily off (maybe 10% of the time its lit).

When: Tends to happen when installing software or unzipping many small files but does not happen during large file transfers (either to or from) or hard drive tests (where the drive shows good performance; ~120MBs reads).

Further details: This didn't start happening until I recently re-installed Windows 7. When it is happening if I open the resource monitor the disk queue length shoots up to ~50 and stays there until I manage to stop whatever is causing the issue.

Specs: 120GB Samsung SSD, 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo, 3GB ram, Hybrid SLi (Laptop)


Thanks for any input!

This may point to a problem with the access time to the SSD. You may want to check that with this measurement program. Also check your alignment: SSD Alignment

The alignment check came out just fine according to your link but the write access time is very high at ~6.2ms which I'm guessing is the issue. How should I proceed from here?

Yeah, that access time is 62 times of what it should be. I would RMA the SSD.

You could try one thing. Set the BIOS and Windows 7 to AHCI (if you have not done that already). AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Enabling AHCI seems to have worked. I got an installing hardware popup when Windows booted. Unfortunately it didn't fix the write performance issues. Probably a hardware failure? Its ~2.5 years old now (kinda wish they would do better than that!).

Thanks for all your help so far BTW!

At least we made some progress. For the write performance you should check whether Trim is enabled. The command is: fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If Command Prompt returns a 0 (zero), your drive supports TRIM and it is enabled.
If it returns 1 (one), the file system has disabled TRIM for your drive

It returned zero so TRIM is enabled.

How bad is the write performance.

I attached a picture of the benchmark readouts from the program you suggested. I had to stop it at the point shown because my computer became unusable and it was clear it wasn't going anywhere quickly.

Hmm, that is slow writes indeed. I don't know what else to suggest and where else to look. The only drastic measure you could take is to image the drive and then clean/wipe the SSD. After that restore the image.