It might be that your SSD is failing, the Samsung EVO lineup is known to produce defective chips, thus they're not recommended to put an OS on them.
My advice, reinstall Windows, if the problem persists, get another SSD.
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It might be that your SSD is failing, the Samsung EVO lineup is known to produce defective chips, thus they're not recommended to put an OS on them.
My advice, reinstall Windows, if the problem persists, get another SSD.
I know you said that you checked the health of your SSD, but did you use the manufacturer's program to do so? I find SMART tables aren't nearly as accurate for solid state drives as they are for spindle drives.
It's unlikely that it's the CPU. I recommend, if you're able, to grab a copy of Parted Magic and boot into that live environment to see if the issue persists. Any live distro will work but I highly recommend PM since it is packaged for troubleshooting.
I just downloaded Samsung's software but it can't run diagnostics for my SSD (850 EVO). It also says "Good" for Drive Health but I suspect that's SMART as well.
When it happens again open the task manager (might take a while), go to performance and look at your SSD. Is it at 100% disk usage?
I had this problem a few times before and it's annoying as hell. One time it was a Windows Store hiccup where it started to update in the background. One time Windows update. One time Nvidia Broadcast got stuck installing. And a lot of times I tried to play Apex Legends and EAC (Easy AntiCheat) scanned my entire drive for a few minutes..
I've tried a ton of tweaks, but start with the following (use CMD as Admin):
sfc /scannow
→ Scans for errors, will probably find some and fix them. Run again till no errors come up
chkdsk /f /r C:
→ Full SSD scan for broken sectors. Will probably ask you to restart, the scan happens after restarting. This fixed a ton of issues with my Windows 11 installation, even though the SSD tests and SMART showed no issues
try having task manager open during a freeze, maybe there's something that spikes the usage for a while?
are there any interesting errors in windows event viewer?
when's the last time you ran a full virus check + Malwarebytes?
you could also try partitioning a drive and installing windows fresh on that, see if it still happens (if the new installation runs fine, you can remove the partition and do a fresh install)