Hey folks, I'm facing a frustrating issue. I've installed Windows 11 on an external NVMe drive, but it's throttling my speeds down to 40 Mbps. Is that how it's supposed to be? The enclosure supports UASP, and the cable works just fine with other drives, reaching over 500 Mbps. However, when I boot from this NVMe, it seems to default to USB 2.0 speeds. Is there anything I can do to lift this limit and achieve the full speed performance of my USB 3.2 connection? For the record, I'm using a USB-C port, and both my NVMe and the enclosure can handle up to 10 Gbps.
2 Answers
It's a bummer, but external drives often fall victim to the speed limits of the ports they're hooked up to. Just because your drive can handle high speeds doesn’t mean the connection will let it. However, if other drives are hitting 500 Mbps on the same port, there might be something going on with this particular setup or configuration.
Just a heads-up, some USB-C ports can actually be restricted to USB 2.0 speeds. I had a similar issue with my Lenovo laptop—modern specs but it still acted like it was stuck in the past. You might want to double-check your laptop’s specs and the capabilities of that particular port.
I get that, but since this specific NVMe worked well as a regular thumb drive, it’s frustrating to see it bottlenecked now that I’m trying to boot from it.