wags1

@Berny Appreciate your willingness to try to help but again, those “general tips” don’t have anything to do with the problem I described. At this point I have uninstalled Kaspersky Security Cloud Free and for now it will stay uninstalled. It’s either a setting that needs to be tweaked or a bug in the program. Thanks.

That answer has nothing to do with my problem at all.

I have been using Kaspersky Security Cloud Free for some time on my Windows 10 Pro laptop (Dell XPS 15) with no problems. I recently purchased a Sandisk Extreme 1TB external SSD. Read/write speeds were so slow it was unusable. Exchanged the SSD for a new one and had the same issue. Even tried a Crucial 1TB external SSD and had the same problem. To make a long story short after days of trying to resolve the issue I finally uninstalled Kaspersky Security Cloud Free and the SSDs worked perfectly with read/write speeds as expected. Reinstalled Kaspersky Security Cloud Free and the read/write speeds returned to basically unusable. Uninstalled Kaspersky Security Cloud Free and the SSDs returned to working perfectly with read/write speeds as expected. Both SSDs I tried (the Sandisk and the Crucial) are able to connect to either USB or Thunderbolt and the problem existed no matter the connection method. Is their a setting somewhere that I am missing or is this some sort of bug with Kaspersky Security Cloud Free?