Sunday, March 12, 2017

[Solved] Slow Windows 10 installation via USB thumbdrive

Was installing a fresh copy of Windows 10 on a new SSD (yep, wanted to avoid the windows 8.1 baggage so went this path)...

Unfortunately, the installation was SLOW!!! it took more than 12 hours to get to the screen where you can choose which drive to setup the Windows OS on.

Yes, more than 12 hours.

After I tried to create a partition on the new SSD, it went through a super super super slow motion of working, I gave up. It just doesn't make sense that a Windows 10 install would take 2 days (ok, i was out for half a day on day 1 so it could have been "faster").

I Googled and realized that this was mentioned on many forums such as tom's hardware, bleeping computer, and so on.

I force shutdown the PC. Unplugged all the 5 other harddisks on the system and tried installation again.

This time, it took less than 10 minutes and the PC was booting up from the new C:\ on the SSD.

SSD - Samsung 850 Evo
Motherboard - Old Asus motherboard (pre 2010 era), with the first generation Intel core i7 cpu.
USB thumbdrive was a USB3 Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB drive plugged into a USB2 port on the system (yeah, the thought crossed my mind that it could be due to USB2, but USB2 is not this slow.. 12 hours for a 7GB file copy? nahh...)