Question NVMe SSD Write Speeds Unusually Low

[dimitrizzle]

Hello all,

This is my first time posting on this forum, so hello everyone!

So I have noticed that my brand new SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD has very unusually low write speed. I decided to install crystal disk and test the speed to see if I was hallucinating or if it was actually unusually slow. I'm using the drive primarily as a storage drive for games.

Here is a screenshot of my test.

Here is a screenshot of a test result that I found in the review section of the product page on Amazon (where I purchased the drive).

It seems that my speeds compared to this user's speeds are drastically different. Any experienced user's out there have any idea why my speeds might be so painfully low?

PC Specs:
W10 Professional
Ryzen 7 7700x
Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo Series DDR5 RAM (32GB)
SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD (1TB)

 

[Lafong]

Have you run your tests with various choices made from the "Profile" tab?

Haven't checked lately, but I think that can affect the readings.

What motherboard do you have.....what motherboard does the Amazon user have?

 

[dimitrizzle]

Thank you for your comment.
I have run it a couple of times with the following profiles and these have been my speeds:

Default: 800.31, 1723.50, 1100.24
Real World Performance: 1909.67, 1713.16, 1790.85
Peak Performance: 1840.86, 1952.13, 1546.25

This is still well below the advertised 6000 MB/s
The Amazon user did not state their specs, but I am using the Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX.

 

[Eximo]

Your drive appears to be 90% full. You need more free space to run such benchmarks. Working as intended I would say.

And it looks like you already need a 2TB drive (which would have been my recommendation for any new build)

 

[Bob.B]

Hello all,

This is my first time posting on this forum, so hello everyone!

So I have noticed that my brand new SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD has very unusually low write speed. I decided to install crystal disk and test the speed to see if I was hallucinating or if it was actually unusually slow. I'm using the drive primarily as a storage drive for games.

Here is a screenshot of my test.

Here is a screenshot of a test result that I found in the review section of the product page on Amazon (where I purchased the drive).

It seems that my speeds compared to this user's speeds are drastically different. Any experienced user's out there have any idea why my speeds might be so painfully low?

PC Specs:
W10 Professional
Ryzen 7 7700x
Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo Series DDR5 RAM (32GB)
SK Hynix Platinum P41 SSD (1TB)

Do you have write caching enabled in device mgr for the disk?

 

[dimitrizzle]

Do you have write caching enabled in device mgr for the disk?

Yes, I do have drive caching enabled.

 

[dimitrizzle]

Your drive appears to be 90% full. You need more free space to run such benchmarks. Working as intended I would say.

And it looks like you already need a 2TB drive (which would have been my recommendation for any new build)

So I have since tried uninstalling games and running the test again at different percentages. They improved only a few hundred MB/s, still nowhere close to the advertised 6000MB/s. At work at the moment so I can't provide exact numbers, but I think the highest I got was 2000MB/s using the peak performance profile.

I can't seem to find any settings in my BIOS that could be modified to help performance. I tried a different m.2 slot as well and that did nothing for performance.

 

[Eximo]

Well, depends on how much TRIM work the drive has to do. (Keep in mind the other drive was a 2TB model and completely empty)

So these drives are TLC NAND. To get the max performance numbers they operate in two ways. Good drives have a DRAM cache they can use to store data before writing it efficiently. And the other is treating the TLC as SLC and only writing one bit to each NAND cell. When your drive has data populated across all the chips there are far less cells available to run in this mode. Once they are saturated the drive has to take data it has collected, and then write completely to the TLC (3-bits per cell) So more or less write as fast as possible, compress later. Without sufficient free space, it just can't keep that up very long.

Temperature is also a factor, the drive will avoid cooking itself by slowing down. More airflow around the drive may help with write speeds.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Another factor is you're testing the system partition. Drive benchmarks are going to be impacted depending on what's going on in the system.