I have two separate Windows installations on the same PC, and each one has a different stability problem. My system has a Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon RX 6900 XT, 64 GB of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4-3200 memory, an ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS (WiFi) motherboard, and two Samsung drives: a 1 TB 970 EVO running Windows 10 Pro and a 4 TB 870 EVO running Windows 10 IoT LTSC. I previously used an RTX 2060 Ti as a secondary GPU, but removed it and uninstalled the NVIDIA drivers. I also replaced a Rosewill Hive 1000S PSU with an ASRock Steel Legend SL-1000P.
The older Windows installation on the 970 EVO has intermittent lag spikes. Sometimes one application stops responding for more than 30 seconds, and sometimes the entire system appears frozen, but it eventually recovers. The installation is also several years old and takes more than a minute to boot, while the newer installation starts in roughly 10 seconds.
The newer Windows installation on the 870 EVO is more problematic. During installation, the computer repeatedly froze or restarted until I disabled Global C-State Control in the BIOS. That allowed the installation to finish, but the system still randomly freezes and requires holding the power button to shut it down, or restarts without warning.
So far I have replaced the PSU and the SATA cable, reseated the RAM, run multiple memory tests, removed the secondary graphics card, removed the NVIDIA drivers, and checked Reliability Monitor. It only reports that Windows was not shut down properly. None of these steps has fixed the issue. I am starting to wonder whether the motherboard or CPU could be faulty. I have also checked the drives with CrystalDiskInfo and am considering whether an SSD firmware update or SMART warning might explain the behavior.
2 Answers
Because disabling Global C-State Control changed the behavior, the CPU or motherboard power-management path could be involved. It is also worth checking Samsung Magician or the manufacturer's support tools for a firmware update for the 870 EVO, since older SSD firmware has caused stability problems for some systems.
Check both SSDs in CrystalDiskInfo and confirm that the overall health status is good rather than Caution or Bad. Pay particular attention to the raw values for reallocated sectors and other media errors. A normal-looking percentage alone is not enough if the raw error counts are increasing.
The 870 EVO shows 100 for Current and Worst, with a threshold of 10, and no obvious warning. The other Samsung drive does not display a reallocated-sector field, so I am not sure whether that attribute is supported for it.
The 870 EVO was eligible for a firmware update, so I installed it. Hopefully that improves the stability.