Pay Attention to Driver Updates After Upgrading to Windows 11: SSD Performance Can Drop by 75% for Some Users

A user discovered a severe performance decrease in their Samsung 970 Evo NVMe SSD after upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11, with sequential read speeds plummeting to 897MB/s, a 75% drop, and sequential write speeds dropping to 859MB/s.

The user confirmed this anomaly with a benchmark test using CrystalDiskMark. The official specifications for the Samsung 970 Evo list sequential read speeds of 3400 MB/s and write speeds of 2500 MB/s, but the measured data after the upgrade was only 26% and 34% of those values, respectively.

However, random read/write performance did not show significant changes, likely because the test load did not fully utilize the SLC cache.

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