Fresh Dual Boot Install on XPS 15 9550 lead to horrific slowness

Hello,

I'm looking for some advice. I recently had to RMA my 9550 because the motherboard died. When I got it back it worked but was very slow, and so I took the opportunity to format it and set up a dual boot Kali Linux (my favorite distro because I'm a networking student and want to get in to pen testing) and Windows 10. I installed Kali on the 30gb SSD, and Windows on the main hard drive. After a fresh install the Kali is blazing fast, as was expected, but the windows install is incredibly slow. It takes over 15 seconds to launch the one program (outside of drivers, etc. I did all of those first) I have installed- chrome. It used. To happen all but instantly. It takes sometimes over 30 to open various windows menus. This seems too slow to be just because it is on the mechanical HDD and not the SSD part.

Could anyone shed some light on this situation for me? Should I blow this away, reinstall Windows on the SSD and use the HDD for storage, and then install Kali on an external drive and simply use the F12 boot menu to access it when I want to use it? Any help is much appreciated. It was slow when I got it back, but I never expected it to still be slow upon fresh installing.

Thanks in advance!

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The SSD is designed for caching only so in your case I would buy a decent size SSD, no other option really. the 30gb isn't much use for anything other than that.

 

That 30GB m.2 SSD is absolute junk. Sell it on Fleabay for $25 and get another drive.

The 1 TB HDD sold with my 9550 was 5200 RPM, so that is about as slow as you will find. But it is big and you can use it for files on a budget.

A good price-performance option is the Samsung 850EVO in the m.2 size. Get as big as possible as they go faster. And on a SSD you need to keep ~30% empty or it goes very slowly. Maybe you can run the operating systems and your programs on that m.2 drive. This is my config.

The newer nvme drives are much faster than the 850EVO. But Samsung is just releasing gen 2. It's expensive and might need some time for the bugs to be worked out.

Also note someone here reported that the 2.5 inch bay is not running at full 6gb/s (a Samsung 850EVO in the bigger 2.5 inch box). Not sure if he resolved it or there is some bus issue with the 9550. So until you get comfort on actual speed of the 2.5 inch bay, be careful of buying a high performance drive there as it could get bottlenecked.