I recently bought an ADATA Premium M.2 Gen 4 SSD with 99% health for a great price ($93 CAD / $68 USD). While it performs well for some games like SF6, the speeds I'm getting are only about 25% of what's advertised. I checked the SSD health using CrystalDiskInfo and performed long and short tests with HD Tune, and everything looks good so far. However, I'm concerned because my motherboard is an AORUS X470 Ultra Gaming. According to their website, it has two M.2 connectors: one supports PCIe 3.0 and the other PCIe 2.0. It seems I'm using the PCIe 2.0 slot, but I can't find clear information about the M2B socket and what generation it is. Can anyone help clarify this?
1 Answer
It sounds like you’ve hit the nail on the head! An M.2 Gen 4 SSD operates on PCIe 4.0 x4, while the specs you’ve shared indicate that the second slot (M2B) only supports up to PCIe 2.0 x4. That would explain the slow speeds; you're looking at about 25% of what it should be delivering. Basically, PCIe 2.0 is definitely lagging behind Gen 4 performance.
Exactly! So, just to clarify, PCIe followed by a number indicates its generation. Since your SSD is Gen 4 on a Gen 2 slot, it’s no surprise the speeds are low. Moving it to a PCIe 3 slot would definitely help, but keep in mind it won’t reach max speed since it's still not on Gen 4.