Why is my SSD only reaching 60 MB/s during game file validation?

If you’re seeing speeds around 60 MB/s, that’s weirdly close to USB 2.0 speeds! It might be worth checking your cables and ports. If they're old or not correctly seated, they could be the issue.

Make sure your SSD is in the right M.2 slot that handles full PCIe x4 bandwidth because some slots can limit speed if they share lanes with other components. Also, a 100% disk usage doesn’t always mean you're at max speed. Steam’s verification does a lot of small random reads, which could lead to that high utilization but low throughput. Also, check if background programs are using the SSD, as they can choke the performance.

You might want to run a standard benchmark like CrystalDiskMark to see if your speeds are consistent. Steam’s file validation can be tricky since it involves checking lots of small files, which puts a CPU load on the system. This could slow everything down, especially if your CPU isn’t up to par.

Your SSD might not have any built-in DRAM cache, which can slow things down if it's using Host Memory Buffer (HMB). Once the buffer gets filled up, read/write speeds can drop significantly. Try rebooting and then writing a smaller file, like 4 GB; that might show you better speeds. However, for larger files, it could still slow down quite a bit, even falling below HDD speeds after the buffer is saturated.

That low speed often occurs when the SSD is working with many small files during the verification process, so it can use 100% of the drive but still show slow speeds. If you notice it staying capped around 60 MB/s generally, check the drive's temperature and health. Ensure it’s installed correctly and update your drivers to avoid throttling.