I've been struggling for about 3 to 5 years now with my PC, and it's really frustrating! After upgrading to Windows 11, I ran into this I/O problem that keeps making my system unresponsive during big file transfers. Whether I'm moving files to and from my main drive or transferring between other drives, everything pretty much freezes up until the transfer completes. I can't even load websites when this happens! It's been so annoying, and I've replaced multiple CPUs, RAM, and motherboards trying to solve it. My setup includes a 5950X CPU, 64GB DDR4 RAM, a B550 motherboard, and a 3.5GBps NVMe drive. Not sure if this is related, but when the issue occurs, one of my drives is often at 100% active time. Any ideas on how to fix this?
4 Answers
I’ve got another tip! USB, SSD, and NVMe drives have their speed limits and tend to sync to the lowest one activated. If you use Robocopy with the /MT switch, it should speed up the file transfers significantly. That way, Windows can allocate more resources to the ongoing task, hopefully smoothing out your experience.
I finally managed to fix a similar issue after years of struggle! Turns out Windows Defender wasn’t set up correctly and lacked essential exclusions. I also adjusted the drive power settings to max performance. A bit of performance monitoring helped me solve it after four years of hassle! Make sure you exclude folders you don’t want scanned, and set your OS drive for maximum performance—it really made a difference for me!
Have you tried using Robocopy? It has a switch allowing you to manage how much processing power you allocate to the copy process. While it might take a bit longer to transfer files, your PC should remain usable during the operation, which could alleviate some of the frustration.
This seems to be more about storage I/O queue saturation rather than your CPU or RAM. When a drive reaches 100% activity, Windows can stall other I/O requests, leading to that freezing feeling you’re experiencing. Check your controller mode—are you using AHCI or RAID? It could also help to update your NVMe firmware and make sure write caching is enabled. Some users reported that disabling Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling and Core Isolation improved their situation after moving to Windows 11.
Related Questions
Lenovo Thinkpad Stuck In Update Loop Install FilterDriverU2_Reload