I recently had a problem with my 2TB internal hard drive that became corrupted, which led me to buy a new 1TB Gen 4 PCIe SSD from Best Buy. I couldn't find the same drive I originally had, but a staff member assured me that this one would work well. After installing the SSD in the closest PCIe slot to my CPU and reinstalling Windows, I've noticed my computer is running very slowly. Even the home screen is laggy, and when I try to play games, I can't even get 60 FPS, despite having a 4060 GPU and an i7 processor that should handle anything smoothly. I've tried switching to a different PCIe slot, but that hasn't helped either. I'm debating whether to go back to my previous hard drive or to get a Gen 3 PCIe SSD, as I've heard that could solve the problem. Any ideas?
4 Answers
You should definitely tell us the models of both your old and new SSD. Something just seems off here with your performance.
Make sure your BIOS, chipset drivers, and the SSD firmware are all updated. Sometimes, settings in the BIOS can control how the PCIe lanes work, so double-check that your SSD is actually running at PCIe 4. If it's set to auto, it might default to a lower standard.
That sounds pretty strange! It might be that the SSD you picked up is a low-end QLC model, which can sometimes feel slower than a regular hard drive. Can you share the specifics of your CPU and motherboard? Sometimes, just because a board has a M.2 slot, it doesn’t mean it’s fully compatible with older hardware. Other drives could be affecting performance too, especially if you have SATA HDDs still plugged in.
Which specific SSD did you pick? Also, does it have a heatsink on it? That can make a difference for thermal performance. If the SSD is mounted on a PCIe card, it's worth checking how many lanes the slot closest to the CPU can handle too.
Yeah, if it's mounted on a PCIe card, it typically should have a heatsink. But you might want to check the lane configuration; that could be affecting speed!
I doubt you'd find any real trash SSDs at Best Buy though. Even budget QLC drives like the Crucial P2 are usually decent as long as they don’t hit their SLC cache limit.