Forced to reinstall, now load times are awful

I was doing expert roulette the other day when all of a sudden FF crashed. Instinctively, the first thing I did was reset my PC. Upon booting it up again, I find that the game had uninstalled itself (I play through Steam), and since then I have done 5 reinstalls each one not helping my issue. Where previously it would take seconds to load into the Mist, Eulmore, anywhere, it now takes a full minute or longer, and with no PCs or NPCs spawning in until a bit later. I used to be the first to load into instances, now I'm the last. Changing jobs takes a second for the hotbars and gear to update, same for opening my inventory. It feels like I'm playing on PS4. I have an i7-9700K, RTX 2060, 16 GB of RAM, and play on minimum laptop settings. I ran the benchmark with the settings I use in game and it scored me at 17,539, extremely high. I'm at a loss for what else I can do to fix the load times. Please help.

Hi I'm not SE tech support but I do have a question that may help.
Were you installed on an SSD or something and re-installed it to a HDD?
Load times are most prominently affected by drive speed, which is why people with solid state drives load so much faster.

If you completely lack a SSD at all, perhaps uninstalling, defragmenting your HDD then reinstalling your game would give it an easier time.
Note just don't ever defrag a SSD.

Good luck!

Good morning and thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

Does this issue happen when Final Fantasy XIV is the only program running? Also, could you provide a system report? Simply go to the 'Config' option on the Final Fantasy XIV launcher and to the right of 'System Information' click on 'Display.'

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Due to no response from the original poster, this thread will be moved to 'Closed Concerns.' If anyone is still having this particular problem, please create a new thread and we will assist you in any way we can.

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