I recently bought an ADATA Premium M.2 Gen 4 SSD for my PS5, which was a steal at 93 CAD (about 68 USD) and according to CrystalDiskInfo, it's in 99% health. While some games like SF6 are loading faster, I've noticed that the SSD speed is only about 25% of what I expected it to be. My motherboard is an Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming. It supports two M.2 connectors: one for PCIe 3.0 and one for PCIe 2.0. I suspect that I may be using the second slot (M2B), which according to the specs might be slowing things down. When I look up M2B socket, I can't find a clear answer about what gen it supports. Can anyone shed light on this?
1 Answer
You're spot on! An M.2 Gen 4 SSD would typically use PCIe 4.0 x4, while the specs you posted indicate that the M2B socket supports only PCIe 2.0 x4. This means you're only getting around 25% of the SSD's potential speed since PCIe 2.0 is much slower than PCIe 4.0. Basically, you're just bottlenecked by the slot you're using!
So just to clarify, any number in PCIe (like 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) refers to the generation, right? I get that I have a Gen 4 SSD in a Gen 2 slot, so I understand the speed issue. If I switch it to the Gen 3 slot, will it still be a huge improvement even if it won’t reach peak speed?