Question WD Black SN850X showing as Gen2 on Asrock B660M-ITX/ac

[sspeed]

I added a WD Black SN850X Gen4 NVMe to my machine. Motherboard is Asrock B660M-ITX/ac which supports Gen4x4 M2. Western Digital Dashboard is showing it as a "Gen2 (32 lanes). Firmware is up to date.

When doing backups over 10gbit to a Synology 1817+, I noticed that the drive wasn't any faster than the 4 SSDs I had installed. Running HDTune or other disk benchmarks also shows it as just a Gen2 speed.

What am I doing wrong? It is not on the supported storage list. Do I just need to hope for a bios update?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Run crystal disk mark, which will show the performance of the drive and confirm what bandwidth it's running at, or if the other program is misreporting.

CrystalDiskMark

About CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a simple disk benchmark software. Download Standard Edition Aoi Edition Shizuku Edition System Requirements OS Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11Windows Server 2003/2008/2012/2016/2019/2022 Architecture x86/x64/ARM64 Key Features Important Notice -> FAQ Unit M...

crystalmark.info

 

[sspeed]

Thank you, it also shows Gen2x32.

This B660 board only has one M2 slot. The manual states: "The Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_1, Key M) supports type 2280 SATA3 6.0 Gb/s & PCIe Gen4x4 (64 Gb/s) modes. * Please be noted that if M2_1 is occupied by a SATA-type M.2 device, SATA3_0 will be disabled."

Is this indication that this M2 slot is actually tied to the chipset vs the CPU? That might explain what I am seeing since I have 4 SSDs installed?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Mark, not info. Mark is a benchmark that will show the speed the drive is reading/writing st, which will 100% confirm what bandwidth it's running at.

Info is likely looking at the same metric as the WD software, which sometimes is inaccurate.

Very unlikely that is running off of the chipset, ports being disabled when using the m.2 slot is very common on b series boards like that.

 

[sspeed]

This is what I'm getting from CrystalDiskMark for disks:

NVMe
Seq read - 42145
Random read - 583
Seq write - 47081
Random write - 1427

SSD
Seq read - 5272
Random read - 304
Seq write - 4959
Random write - 760

 

[triplex1]

Are you doing something wrong or is the disk having a problem
Update the disk
Update the app
Update the motherboard bios
My disk is almost the same and it's one of the best.

 

[sspeed]

Sorry, those results were from CrystalDIskMark Retro, I ran the 8.0 and am seeing about 10x the speed of my SSDs.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

In sequential a 1tb 850x tested at sequential 6900 read, 6300 write in toms own crystal disk mark testing. How close is your drive performing to this? Keep in mind if windows or anything else is running on the drive you may not see results quite that high

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn850x-ssd-review-back-in-black/2

If the performance is remotely close to this, it is running at 4.0 x4.

If it only had 2 lanes, or were operating at a slower Pcie version the performance will be less than half of this at maximum.

 

[sspeed]

Yeah, I am getting 6800 read, 6500 write, so it must just be a reporting issue. And the fact I don't see faster on backups to the Synology 1817+ over 10gbit, or to other SSDs, must be their limitations.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Yeah, I am getting 6800 read, 6500 write, so it must just be a reporting issue. And the fact I don't see faster on backups to the Synology 1817+ over 10gbit, or to other SSDs, must be their limitations.

I figured as much. Good to know there's nothing wrong going on though.

Do remember there's a difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte.

10 gigabit lan is only capable of 1 gigabyte per second maximum, although usually less than this. So this will become a major constraints to performance too.