Sad to say, I've got another client's new Lenovo ThinkPad 320 sitting on my workbench and, as you all have guessed, this one (which has a 1TB Seagate) is just a rubbish, in terms of the hard disk speed as the others I wrote about before.
I was unable to try the trick that I talked about - changing the Intel IDE/ATAPI controller to Microsoft's own - because, on this machine, there is no such controller. The only thing like that present is an Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller and this has no option to use a Microsoft driver as an alternative. I did have the ability to upgrade it to the lastest 2018 version and did do that - but no difference.
Out of curiosity - but fearing the worst - I went into the Bios (via the official route: PC Settings> Update & Security > Recovery > Advanced Settings) and changed the mode from Intel SATA RAID to ATAPI but, as I expected, this caused the machine to be unable to boot, so, dabbing F2 repeated as the machine restarted, I went into the Bios and changed that back again
Backing away from that dead-end, I followed dooce's advice and uninstalled the Lenovo Vantage - no difference - I then went to uninstall the two remaining Lenovo apps, one of which was Lenovo Settings. I ran that app first and was told that it was no longer needed, because its functionality was wrapped into Vantage! Anyway, all three Lenovo apps are now history but that made little difference. And I had rebooted after each was zapped.
So what should I do? Well, I'm advising the client to get her money back from where she bought it (Lenovo directly) not least because the old Win7 Samsung laptop she brought to me at the same time - so I can copy the data onto the Lenovo - now performs massively better than the Lenovo, despite it being six years old and having a Pentium B950 2.1GHz, compared to the Lenovo's i3-7100U 2,4GHz CPU. And I haven't yet finished tweaking and twiddling - though I had on the Lenovo, to no good affect.
Okay, the Samsung has 6GB of RAM, compared to the Lenovo's 4GB but I don't for a minute think that's relevant here - the Lenovo is just not fit for purpose.
I've attached a couple of screengrabs so people can see the relative hard disk speeds of the two machines - and see just how horribly erratic the Lenovo is across different size of file reads and writes.