I recently bought an ADATA Premium M.2 Gen 4 SSD (2TB) for my PS5 for a pretty good price (about 93 CAD or 68 USD), and while it works fine and some games like Street Fighter 6 load a lot faster, I've noticed that the speed is only around 25% of what is advertised. I used CrystalDiskInfo and HD Tune to check the health and there are no errors. My motherboard is an AORUS X470 Ultra Gaming, and according to the specifications on their site, it has two M.2 connectors: one supports PCIe 3.0 and the other supports PCIe 2.0. I suspect I'm using the PCIe 2.0 slot, but I can't find clear info online about the M2B socket to confirm if it's indeed slower. Any insights on this would be appreciated!
2 Answers
Yeah, that totally makes sense! Running a PCIe 4 drive in a PCIe 3 slot will cut the speed down by about half, and since you're actually on a PCIe 2 slot, that’s why your speeds are so low. Moving it to the correct slot should help quite a bit!
Your M.2 Gen 4 SSD should really be running at PCIe 4.0 speeds, but it looks like it's installed in a slot that only supports PCIe 2.0. That would explain why you're only getting about 25% of the expected speeds. PCIe 2.0 is indeed a lot slower than PCIe 4.0. You might want to check if you can move it to the PCIe 3.0 slot for a significant performance boost!
Exactly! So, if you're running a Gen 4 SSD on a Gen 2 slot, that really throttles your speed. If you upgrade to the Gen 3 slot, you'll definitely notice a better performance, even if it's not the full potential.
Good to hear you moved to the Gen 3 slot! Even though it won't hit the max Gen 4 speeds, you'll still see a nice improvement from what you had before.