Thanks vmrale,
The SATA HDs used for the VM Host and the physical PC is the same Seagate SATA model.
So I guess I should either be looking at BIOS settings of the VM Host and/or settings for the Windows 10 VM ?
Are there any more tweaks or statistics I can look at from the ESXi toolset that would help pin-point the issue, now that we've determined it's not the virtual drive driver?
Thanks!