What causes average response time into the seconds for an SSD?

I'm using a Samsung 700T tablet/convertible (basicallly, the Samsung equivalent of the Microsoft Surface Pro.) It runs Windows 8.1 This comes with a dual-core ULV CPU, 4 GB of RAM (which is too little!) and 128 GB SSD.

This computer occasionally gets very sluggish, pausing for 10-30 seconds before responding to clicks. It feels as if the computer is paging in memory, but I'm not quite out (3.1 GB utilization out of 3.9 GB) However, when this happens, performance monitor shows that average disk response time is in many-seconds.

With an SSD, how can that happen? I'm supposed to get 10000 ops/s through that interface, right? No heavy mechanics involved.

See this screen shot for what this is:

The second question is: How can I fix this? (If at all.)

Solution 1:

Your SSD seems to be used 100%, causing the high answer time and definitely also wearing it off. There has to be a process causing this, e.g. an antivirus solution meaning it too well. Fastest way to determine what's wrong should be to simply look up which application it is. While the perfomance monitor Windows 8 delivers is pretty powerfull, you should really try ProcExplorer

Run it with elevated rights, right-click any column, select columns and view the I/O:

As soon as you know which application it is, come back and we'll try to find a way to stop this.

Solution 2:

I had this happen on Windows 10. I uninstalled the Intel SATA controller in device manager (requiring a lot of patience, given the slow response).

Before rebooting, also open regedit and re-enable the storahci service (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\StartOverride -- set to 0), otherwise your machine won't boot (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). If you forget, you can start up in safe mode and do it