I recently bought an ADATA premium M.2 Gen 4 SSD for PS5 with 99% health at a bargain price of 93 CAD (around 68 USD). While it's performing well for some games, like Street Fighter 6, I'm noticing that the speed is only about 25% of the advertised rates. I checked the health status with CrystalDiskInfo and ran both long and short tests with HD Tune without any errors. I'm using an AORUS X470 Ultra Gaming motherboard, which features two M.2 connectors. One supports PCIe 3.0 and the other supports PCIe 2.0. I believe I'm using the PCIe 2.0 slot, but I can't find clear information on the M2B socket's generation online. Could that be the reason for the slow speeds? If I switch to the PCIe 3.0 slot, would I see a significant speed improvement?
1 Answer
You're spot on! An M.2 Gen 4 SSD should ideally work with PCIe 4.0 x4 to fully utilize its speed. Since your motherboard's spec states the second slot is PCIe 2.0 x4, that’s why you’re seeing such reduced performance—about 25% of what it should be.
So just to clarify, the PCIe version number indicates the generation too, right? I get that having a Gen 4 SSD on a Gen 2 slot will be slower, but if I switch to a Gen 3 slot, I should still see a speed boost, just not the max?