My Transcend TS1TMTE110Q 1TB NVMe drive takes hours to install or patch games through Steam, even when the operation should only take a few minutes. Benchmark write speeds fluctuate between roughly 20 and 200 MB/s, while I expected around 1,500 MB/s. The drive idles near 65°C and reaches about 80–83°C during downloads or benchmarks. My case airflow is good, and neither the CPU nor GPU is blowing hot air directly onto it. Could overheating be causing the slowdown, and would adding an inexpensive heatsink solve the problem?
2 Answers
The TS1TMTE110Q is an entry-level PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive, and its advertised speed is usually a short burst rather than sustained writing. Once its cache fills, write performance can drop dramatically, especially during large game installs or patches. Steam also spends time reading, decompressing, and rewriting many small files, so its displayed write speed may be much lower than a sequential benchmark. Check how much free space remains, since performance can suffer badly when the drive is nearly full; keeping at least 10–20% free is a good idea. Also check the drive’s health and SMART data in a utility such as CrystalDiskInfo.
A heatsink is worth trying, but it may not completely explain hours-long patch times. Temperatures over 80°C can trigger thermal throttling, and 65°C at idle is already unusually high, so make sure the drive is installed correctly and has airflow over it. A basic M.2 heatsink with a properly fitted thermal pad should reduce the temperature and may prevent throttling. Before buying anything, monitor the drive temperature and speed during a benchmark; if the speed collapses as the temperature rises, heat is a major factor.
If it still drops to around 10 MB/s after improving cooling, check the drive’s remaining capacity, health status, motherboard slot mode, and whether another process is using the disk. Steam patching can also be limited by CPU decompression or file processing rather than raw NVMe write speed.
It is not necessarily defective just because it cannot sustain 1,500 MB/s. That figure is generally a best-case burst result, while budget drives can slow to hard-drive-like speeds after their cache is exhausted.