I recently purchased an ADATA Premium M.2 Gen 4 SSD for my PS5, and I got it for a bargain at 93 CAD (about 68 USD). While some games like Street Fighter 6 load significantly faster, I'm noticing that overall, the speed of the SSD is only about 25% of what was advertised. I checked the SSD's health using CrystalDiskInfo and HD Tune, but it looks fine. My motherboard is the Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming, and I noticed that it has two M.2 connector slots, one that supports PCIe 3.0 and the other PCIe 2.0. I suspect I might be using the slower socket (M2B), but I couldn't find clear information on what generation that slot truly is. Can anyone help clarify this?
2 Answers
Yeah, it's pretty straightforward: a Gen 4 SSD in a PCIe 3.0 slot will be half the bandwidth. If you were on the 2.0 slot, that's even more limited. Just switching to a Gen 3 slot should give you a nice speed boost, but keep in mind, you still won't be able to fully leverage the Gen 4 speeds.
It sounds like you're using a PCIe 2.0 slot, which would dramatically limit your SSD's speed. A Gen 4 SSD requires a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection to reach its full potential, and since your current slot only supports PCIe 2.0 x4, you're getting just a fraction of the speed.
Exactly! PCIe versions indicate the generation, so if you're on a Gen 2 slot, that's why your speeds are so low. Moving it to a Gen 3 slot could help, but you still won't hit the max speeds of Gen 4.
Totally makes sense! I had a similar experience, switched my SSD around and saw a huge improvement once I got it into a compatible slot.