Question 1TB Kingston NV3 M2 SSD is extremely slow

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mafi

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Oct 15, 2008
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System: Core i5 10400F, 16GB DDR4 2666 Mhz, H410m motherboard.

A week ago I bought the Kingston NV3 1TB M2 SSD.
Tried to install Red Dead Redemption 2 from Steam. Download starts, it reaches 20-30Mb/s for a very short time, then it's decreasing to several mb/s, then it stops. Then it starts downloading again with several mb/s for a short time, then it stops again. I was able to download less than 5% in 2 hours.

I also have an older 500GB Sata SSD. Tried installing Red Dead Redemption 2 and it was able to download constanly with 50-60MB/s. Took less than one hour.
I tried copying from another drive to Kingston NV3. The speed is only 2-3 mb/s
Tried installing something on the NV3 and it's extremely slow.
I know that QLC SSD can get slow writing speeds, but in this case it's practically unusable. I can't copy anything or install anything on it.

But to my surprise, I was able to move pretty fast the installation of Steam edition of Hogwarts Legacy from the Sata 500GB SSD to the NV3.
The game loads pretty fast and the game runs smoothly(over 60 fps on average) without freezes/stuttering (Checked the FPS, including 1% and 0.1% lows, with MSI Afterburner). Ran the game in 1920x1080 with high detail. GPU is an RTX 2070.

Any advice ?
 
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QLC being slower doesn't become an issue until you fill the psueodo-SLC cache on an SSD, which on that drive would be about 250GB. Until you've written nearly that much data in a single transfer at maximum speed, the drive won't start needing to fold to native QLC or write at native speeds. If you're writing at a lower speed, it can fold to QLC at the same time. So being that much slower downloading right from the start and then dropping to almost nothing and going up and down wouldn't have anything to do with the QLC and wouldn't be using up the pSLC cache, unless you had been doing a lot of other writing at the same time or just prior to starting the RDR2 download, so much that the pSLC hadn't been able to recover. Native QLC is still faster than 30MBps.

Very odd for the NV3 to have such issues with the download speed, installing software or copying files to it, but then be able to transfer a game from the SATA drive to the NV3 quickly.

Which specific brand and model is the motherboard? H410M is a partial model name from multiple brands.

Make sure motherboard BIOS is up to date, all drivers are up to date, firmware on the drive is up to date if available. Run benchmarks like AS SSD, Atto, Crystal DiskMark and see what comes up.

Use Crystal DiskInfo to verify the link speed and number of lanes for the NV3. The H410 Express chipset only supports PCIe Gen2 which severely limits an SSD's speed.
 
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Assuming it's the Gigabyte H410M H, the M.2 slot runs through the chipset, not the CPU, and is limited to PCIe2.0. (The specs of the board say the PCIe slots are PCIe3, but that's physically impossible. The CPU lanes all go to the x16 slot, and the H410 chipset simply doesn't support Gen3. The Asus PRIME H410M-A and MSI H410M PRO make the same claim. Only the x16 slots are Gen3.)

It would be POSSIBLE to provide Gen3 slots or even M.2 slot because all the supported CPUs support splitting their 16 lanes to 2x8 or 1x8+2x4, but all of these boards specify that the x16 slot is using all 16 lanes and make no mention of the M.2 slot taking any of them at any time.

That's still a good bit faster than a SATA drive (and they cost the same) but is a huge limitation. It should still perform as well as or better than the SATA drive. But DiskInfo should show the NV3 as running at PCIe2x4 even though it supports PCIe4x4.

Other "H410M" boards don't use the H410 chipset apparently, but rather the H470 for example. This one does support Gen3. That doesn't explain why they all claim their H410 chipset boards do PCIe3.
 
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HwInfo says it's a Realtek RTS5763DL.
It looks like I got scammed. I bought an SSD that isn't working properly with a fake Kingston NV3 sticker on it.
 
mafi said:
HwInfo says it's a Realtek RTS5763DL.
It looks like I got scammed. I bought an SSD that isn't working properly with a fake Kingston NV3 sticker on it.
Click to expand...
Why do you think you got scammed? Kingston is one of those brands that uses whatever components happen to be most cost-effective or available during each production run, so a particular model may have different components depending on when it was manufactured. They just ensure that they only rate the drive for whatever the lowest-performance components can do to ensure that everyone gets at least the minimum rated performance, and then sometimes people will get one that has better, faster components. Different NV3 drives may use different controllers and different flash. That makes reviews nearly useless since you can't be sure which one you'll get (unless enough people document information like production dates and codes so you can look at the packaging and labels), and they got in trouble for that years ago because they didn't explicitly indicate that they used varying parts.

Doesn't mean it's not a bad drive, or even that it's not a fake one, but just the use of that controller is not an indication of anything. If you mean the drive is actually not reporting ANY Kingston identifiers, then yeah there's a good chance it's fake.
 
evermorex76 said:
Why do you think you got scammed? Kingston is one of those brands that uses whatever components happen to be most cost-effective or available during each production run, so a particular model may have different components depending on when it was manufactured. They just ensure that they only rate the drive for whatever the lowest-performance components can do to ensure that everyone gets at least the minimum rated performance, and then sometimes people will get one that has better, faster components. Different NV3 drives may use different controllers and different flash. That makes reviews nearly useless since you can't be sure which one you'll get (unless enough people document information like production dates and codes so you can look at the packaging and labels), and they got in trouble for that years ago because they didn't explicitly indicate that they used varying parts.

Doesn't mean it's not a bad drive, or even that it's not a fake one, but just the use of that controller is not an indication of anything. If you mean the drive is actually not reporting ANY Kingston identifiers, then yeah there's a good chance it's fake.
Click to expand...
Kingston SSD Manager doesn't recognize it.
Device manager shows only "SSD 1TB". The other drives are listed with their manufacturer name and model.
https://imgur.com/a/srPJcYX
View: https://imgur.com/a/srPJcYX
 
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