BShenV12

Late reply - but just to update, still no go. This is bare metal (and VBS is already off), while Defender is on default settings which I've never touched (turning off some of the related switches didn't work anyway). AIDA64 7.2 did give a more detailed description of the error, saying the SSD is used by a process - which it shouldn't be, given that I've gone as far as to delete the partition of the drive. Any ideas what else could be blocking write access to the drive?

Recently AIDA64 has refused to run linear write tests for reasons that I have no clue of - it simply just says "cannot open drive" to every SSD I installed on the system (they're empty drives). The same benchmarking rig used to work just fine previously, and attempting this on a clean Windows 11 install plus stock BIOS settings didn't get it to run either ever since. Here's specs: Intel Core i9-13900K ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 HERO NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition Kingston Renegade RGB DDR5-6400 Boot drive: Samsung 980 PRO 256GB Tested drive: (in this screenshot) OS: Windows 11 Home 22H2 https://imgur.com/a/norBJnI