I recently bought an Adata Premium 2TB M.2 Gen 4 SSD for my PS5 for a pretty cheap price of 93 CAD (68 USD), and while it's working and some games like Street Fighter 6 load faster, I'm noticing that the performance seems to be only about 25% of what was advertised. I checked the SSD's health using CrystalDiskInfo and HD Tune, and everything looks good with no errors. My motherboard is the Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming, and I saw that it has two M.2 connectors: one supporting PCIe 3.0 and another supporting PCIe 2.0. I believe I'm using the second (M2B) slot, but I'm confused about its generation and why my speeds are so low.
1 Answer
It looks like you're using a PCIe 2.0 slot with your SSD. M.2 Gen 4 SSDs are designed for PCIe 4.0, which is way faster—think about 25% speed if you're on PCIe 2.0. So, moving it to a PCIe 3.0 slot should definitely boost your speeds, but it sounds like you still won’t hit max capabilities because that’s still not Gen 4. It’s a classic case of hardware limitations.
Exactly! PCIe versions indicate the generation, so having a Gen 4 SSD in a Gen 2 slot definitely caps your performance. It should still be better in the Gen 3 slot, at least.