Windows or “Windoze”, as people lovingly call it, is no stranger to weird problems that crop up one fine day without rhyme or reason. Perhaps one of the weirdest issues I have ever faced on my Windows PC has been my Ethernet speed randomly dropping from 200Mbps to 100Mbps. This unfortunate halving of my internet speeds has stumped me for 3 years, and I’ve tried multiple fixes to no avail. I had almost given up when a 9-year-old forum post finally gave me the solution — bizarrely, it was a quick SSD tweak that fixed everything.

I tried everything over the last three years

From hardware to software, nothing seemed to stick

Before you wonder why I’m messing with my SSD to fix my Ethernet speed, let me enlighten you about the obvious fixes I tried (unsuccessfully). The first thing I did was recheck the network adapter settings, looking for the usual suspects: Energy-Efficient Ethernet, Flow Control, Gigabit Lite, Green Ethernet, Power Saving Mode, and Speed & Duplex. All the settings that could result in a link speed negotiation to 100Mbps instead of 1Gbps were already disabled, and “Speed & Duplex” was set to “Auto Negotiation”, as it should be.

Next, I decided to check out the router settings, thinking the ISP guys might have used default settings that were causing these network speed problems. I couldn’t locate any flaws in the QoS settings, and every other Ethernet setting was fine as well. I also updated the network adapter drivers to eliminate outdated drivers as a suspect. It was time to turn to the Ethernet cable itself. Sadly, I could easily confirm that it was a CAT6e cable. The 100Mbps connection wasn’t a constant — I always had a few weeks of 1Gbps link speed now and then before the issue inevitably resurfaced — so the cable wasn’t the culprit anyway.

I even suspected the RJ45 connectors at both ends (PC and router) of improper crimping and low shielding, so I got the ISP professional to recrimp the cables with new, high-quality connectors. As you can guess, however, the annoying 100Mbps link speed didn’t go anywhere. The only thing that worked (sometimes) was unplugging the Ethernet cable from the router or PC end, waiting a few seconds, and replugging it. The PC sometimes renegotiated to 1Gbps link speed, but the good times never lasted.

A fix from an old forum post finally did the trick

And it had to do with the SSD, of all things

I had grudgingly accepted the 100Mbps Ethernet speed as an unsolvable Windows problem, or at least something that I would have to deal with until I upgraded to a new PC. However, one fine day, I Googled about the same issue, and came across a forum post that I had somehow missed before. It wasn’t a recent post either, since the OP had posted it back in 2016. The issue they described was identical to the one troubling me for the last three years, and I was desperate to discover if the comments had some magical solution that would help me out.

To my surprise, an update from the OP described how a regular SSD maintenance job suddenly fixed their Ethernet problem — enabling overprovisioning on the SSD immediately switched the link speed back to 1Gbps. I was naturally skeptical as storage and networking speeds had little to do with each other. Still, beggars can’t be choosers; I had tried almost everything, and wasn’t about to ignore a simple tweak that had apparently solved an identical problem on not just the OP’s computer, but also on someone else’s system in the comments on the post.

I checked my primary SSD, and found that it already had overprovisioning enabled. One of the comments on the post mentioned something similar, and described how shrinking one of the data partitions of the SSD had fixed the problem for them. So, I had my work cut out for me: I fired up Disk Management, reduced the size of my Games partition by around 50GB, and restarted the computer. Since that day, my PC connection hasn’t dropped to 100Mbps — the link speed has remained consistent at 1Gbps for around a month now. I was simultaneously delighted and baffled by how reducing an SSD partition could fix my 3-year-old Ethernet speed issue.

I don’t know why it worked, but I’ll take it

The days of 50% download speeds are behind me

At first, I tried to find some connection between SSD free space and internet connection speeds, but since the issue was presumably solved (it hasn’t resurfaced for a month), I didn’t dwell much on it. Searching for a possible connection online, I found a post claiming that a nearly-full SSD can hinder regular Windows operations that can, in rare cases, affect the network interface. Although I call BS on that, I have to admit that reducing my data partition and fixing the Ethernet speeds had some correlation. It’s either that, or I changed another setting in the last month that I can’t remember. I have my fingers crossed — in case the link speed switches back to 100Mbps one day, I’ll be back to square one. It hasn’t happened in a month, but I’ve learned to never say never.

Sometimes, the wrong road can lead to the right destination

I would never have considered messing around with my SSD to solve a persistent Ethernet problem, but that’s how Windows behaves sometimes. I can’t believe that a 3-year-old problem magically disappeared around the same time I implemented this SSD fix. The connection is there; I just don’t see it yet. If you’ve faced a similar issue on your PC and struggled to fix it, maybe it’s time to think way out of the box. Maybe this SSD tweak or some other seemingly unrelated fix will work for you.