At startup, "system" is consuming a tremendous amount of I/O.

I removed my virus scan software to eliminate it as a possible contributor to this issue.

I also disabled Windows Defender via the GUI

One major I/O offender involved files being written to System Volume Information. I finally was able to disable System Protection, which appears to have taken care of this issue.

Now I have a tremdous amount of I/O writing files to C:\Windows\System32\config\RegBack\