I recently bought an ADATA Premium M.2 Gen 4 SSD for my PS5, which I got for a great deal (about $93 CAD or $68 USD). While it's working fine and some games like Street Fighter 6 load much faster than before, I'm seeing speeds that are around only 25% of what the specs advertise. I checked the health of the SSD using CrystalDiskInfo and HD Tune, and there are no errors. My motherboard is the Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming, and according to its specs, it has two M.2 slots: one supports PCIe 3.0 while the other supports PCIe 2.0. I think I'm currently using the second one, but I'm not clear about its speed capabilities. Can anyone shed light on why the performance is so low?
2 Answers
Totally makes sense! PCIe 4 drives in a PCIe 2 slot will definitely lead to a bottleneck. When you switch to a PCIe 3 slot, that's a big improvement; you should be getting around half the bandwidth of what the drive can do. If you're noticing it's not quite at max speed even in the PCIe 3 slot, that's because it's not fully utilizing the Gen 4 capabilities. But it should still be way faster than before!
It sounds like you're right on track. Your M.2 Gen 4 SSD should be running at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds, but if it's plugged into the second socket that only supports PCIe 2.0 x4, that's definitely limiting your speeds. PCIe 2.0 is about 25% the speed of PCIe 4.0, so that explains your slow performance. If you can move it to the first socket that supports PCIe 3.0, you'll notice a significant boost, though it won't reach full Gen 4 speeds. Just remember that even PCIe 3.0 is an improvement over PCIe 2.0!
Yeah, so you're basically running a Gen 4 SSD on a Gen 2 slot. If you switch to that PCIe 3.0 slot, you're gonna see much better speeds. Just not the max potential of your drive.
Yeah, that's right! I had a similar issue with my setup. Moving from a PCIe 2 to a PCIe 3 really made a difference for me too! Just remember it's all about making sure your hardware supports each other.