Question M.2 Drive downloads slower than SATA drive

[Crivision]

Recently picked up a WD SN570 1TB because I thought it was about time to see what the buzz around M.2 was.
For reference, I had a HDD and a SATA SSD beforehand and I wanted to primarily just use the HDD to be a random storage drive now.
I reinstalled Windows and had formatted all the drives, but I noticed something very peculiar on Steam in particular.

My download speed on the new M.2 drive would range from 0-84mb/s

On the contrary, my download speed on the old SATA SSD is a consistently above 75mb/s without any dips in performance.

I've tested the drives in Crystal Disk Mark and the M.2 is performing as it should, is there something I'm missing here? It just seems like the M.2. is being outperformed but I feel as if I've done something wrong.

 

[USAFRet]

Drive speed has NOTHING to do with download speed from Steam.

Even an HDD is "faster" than what Steam will deliver. Even on a gigabit connection from your ISP.

 

[Crivision]

Drive speed has NOTHING to do with download speed from Steam.

Even an HDD is "faster" than what Steam will deliver. Even on a gigabit connection from your ISP.

Interesting, any hypothesis on the discrepancy between the two drives then?

 

[USAFRet]

Interesting, any hypothesis on the discrepancy between the two drives then?

Difference in time of day.
Different Steam server.
Workload on the specific Steam server.
Multiple other things.

It is not the drive.

 

[CountMike]

Recently picked up a WD SN570 1TB because I thought it was about time to see what the buzz around M.2 was.
For reference, I had a HDD and a SATA SSD beforehand and I wanted to primarily just use the HDD to be a random storage drive now.
I reinstalled Windows and had formatted all the drives, but I noticed something very peculiar on Steam in particular.

My download speed on the new M.2 drive would range from 0-84mb/s

On the contrary, my download speed on the old SATA SSD is a consistently above 75mb/s without any dips in performance.

I've tested the drives in Crystal Disk Mark and the M.2 is performing as it should, is there something I'm missing here? It just seems like the M.2. is being outperformed but I feel as if I've done something wrong.

Check your internet's download speed.

 

[Crivision]

[/QUOTE]

Check your internet's download speed.

95mb/s down, 53mb/s up

 

[Position_Emergency]

I've had the EXACT same issue with the same drive.
I've posted about it on Reddit here
My hypothesis is:
Initially, the download is fast when it's using the SLC cache (12 GB in size)
Speed tanks after this because the drive can't keep up with writing the download to disk + decompressing + installing.
Either the compression is incredibly aggressive or the decompressing process needs to be optimised.

So there is probably blame on both the WD SN570 and Steam here...
Regardless, I would strongly advise people to avoid the SN570 and get something with DRAM because the price difference right now is not substantial.
P.S. A friend has the SN550 (the original version before WD nerfed it) and he doesn't have this issue at all. So there are DRAM-less drive that will work fine so it seems like WD cheaped out on something with the SN570