I have a little idea. I know Windows does a lot of useless disk access¹, but I never thought it was localized before I tried a VM. I always assumed it was random, but it looks like it's kinda random, but all over the same small area, and Windows can't optimize it for some reason.

Anyway, if you do that, you better keep those ~3GB free. If you don't have enough cache things break down really fast.

1 - It is for cortana, file indexing, telemetry, and etc. If you take the time to disable them, your computer will get much faster... for about a week, until it updates again.

While we're spitballing, from my recollection, it seems to do a lot of small writes; probably different write cache policies, possibly including the VM not passing through fsync/write barriers.

And, you know, organizational failure to have this issue lingering.

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is telemetry related. Resmon will frequently show ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) files getting a detrimental quantity of I/O directed their way, especially at boot...

Ye sometimes my Win10 computer slows down alot and there is some telemetry service in the tasklist hogging like 5% CPU. The malware service is also a thief. I mean they could just make those run at like 1/5 speed and it would be fine. Add some sleep() ...