SSD is original, I would have to run a health check to confirm. if it is the SSD once the OS is installed.
I do have a external backup drive i can boot from and test if it fixes it but i highly doubt it would.
Booting from a fast external SSD would help to rule that out. Then you can test I/O to the internal SSD directly. If you get sequential I/O speeds less than 200MB/sec from that drive, it would suggest to me it's close to EOL. It's hard to find benchmarks from the 64GB SSD used in that model so that's just a ROM guess of what you should get. The larger SSD used in that model got ~ 500MB/sec.
When SSD start to reach EOL, their ability to write fails first. As SSD memory cells become unreliable, the drive controller marks them as bad and then starts to move contents around to find better places to write the data. As more cells fail, more data has to be moved around to fewer and fewer remaining reliable locations and this process takes longer.
This is different than either fragmented filesystems on HDD and HDD failures. In the latter case, reads tend to fail first as the drive loses the ability to read it's own data. You tend to get lots of retries which is usually noticable both in response time and noise.
Also wiping an SSD has less impact on performance that it does on an HDD. An HDD can be working very well at the hardware level but feel slow due to fragmentation. The impact of fragmentation on HDD is much more significant due to the inherent mechanical latency of the latter. Wiping and reinstalling the data/OS/etc on an HDD is more likely to restore a system to it's former glory in those cases. With an SSD, there may be some upside but likely minimal unless the OS was corrupted/bloated. Otherwise, it just adds wear.
By the way, do you have the 11" or 13" MacBook Air? Old spec pages say the 5,2 was a 13" MacBook Air but they also say the 64GB SSD was only available on the 11" MacBook Air.
