I just purchased a 1TB Kingston Standard NV3 M.2 NVMe SSD and installed it in my secondary PCIe port. Initially, everything seemed to work fine—Windows detected the drive, and I even moved a game to it without issues. However, when I tried to download a game, the performance dropped dramatically; I'm only seeing write speeds of 1 or 2 Mbps while downloading at 90 Mbps. I performed a CrystalDisk test yesterday, and it showed decent speeds around 1500 MBps—far below its potential of up to 6000 MBps. Now I can't even run the test at 64 MiB. My motherboard is a PRIME B550M-K and I have a Ryzen 5 5600G CPU, along with an XPG Pylon 650 power supply and an RX 7600 XT GPU. Could there be an incompatibility issue? I plan to upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5800X soon. Any thoughts?
5 Answers
Your system only supports PCIe Gen 3 speeds, which explains why you can't reach that max speed. Also, your SSD is in the second M.2 slot that's linked to the chipset instead of the CPU, causing potential bottlenecks. Try moving it to the top M.2 slot and see if that improves performance.
Did you get the drive brand new? You might want to run CrystalDiskInfo to check the SMART status for any potential issues.
Just to rule it out—what's the temperature of your SSD? If it's hitting over 70°C, it might be throttling due to heat.
It's strange that it worked well initially and now it's slowing down. Make sure there aren't any background processes consuming disk IO—check your Task Manager! It sounds like a software issue, especially since it performed well at first. Also, consider updating your BIOS.
Keep in mind that Mbps (Megabits per second) and MBps (Megabytes per second) are different. Your download speed is in Mbps, which means a maximum of about 11 MBps for disk transfers. It's possible that your disk isn’t the bottleneck. When downloading a game, decompression can be CPU-intensive—make sure a core isn't maxed out. Also, Windows might be slowing things down with Defender scanning. If you turn off real-time scanning, you might notice a significant speed increase.
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