Question what could cause an SSD to have slow load times in games?

[Fred_9]

This is probably just paranoia. I have a 480gb SSD ("SanDisk SSD PLUS 480GB") that is only a few years old, that I only have a couple games stored on. I've noticed over the past few weeks that loading in at least one game (Final Fantasy XIV) is a lot slower than I feel it should be - slower than others who have the game installed on older PCs on HDDs. I don't exactly know what I'm looking for but watching the numbers on task manager the read speed seemed to peak around 30MB/s which seems... low?
CrystalDiskInfo says its health is "99%", which is a bit higher than my other drives (90%, 88% and 'Caution' - and that last one is expected since it's an old HDD that I dump everything on and really need to upgrade from, which is its own set of issues), and as far as I can tell there's no other issues with it. So what might be causing the slower load times? How can I test what the issue might be?
thanks in advance

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

What kind of temp is the ssd hitting? Run HWMon/Info, and check out max temp after playing a game or doing some task.

SSD's can slow down when temps get high (throttling). They can also slow a bit when they are close to full.

 

[Fred_9]

Hey there,

What kind of temp is the ssd hitting? Run HWMon/Info, and check out max temp after playing a game or doing some task.

SSD's can slow down when temps get high (throttling). They can also slow a bit when they are close to full.

currently hovering around 35-37C even when running games. Has been quite hot in terms of ambient temperature recently thanks to the heatwave, but I'd assume running at 37C is fine.
this SSD also isn't particularly full, about 30% free, which is emptier than all my other drives!

 

[Ralston18]

Noted: "but watching the numbers on task manager".

Good.

Will add the suggestion to use Resource Monitor as well. (Just use one of them at a time though.)

And Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) may reveal something as well.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

currently hovering around 35-37C even when running games. Has been quite hot in terms of ambient temperature recently thanks to the heatwave, but I'd assume running at 37C is fine.
this SSD also isn't particularly full, about 30% free, which is emptier than all my other drives!

Hmmm, that is odd. I wouldn't expect it to slow down at all.

Try 1 and 2 here: 4 Solutions to SanDisk SSD Slow in Windows 10, 8, 7 (diskpart.com) and see if it makes any difference.

 

[Fred_9]

Noted: "but watching the numbers on task manager".

Good.

Will add the suggestion to use Resource Monitor as well. (Just use one of them at a time though.)

And Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) may reveal something as well.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

I will keep an eye on it with task manager/resource monitor and see what I can try and gleam from process explorer, thank you. So far again it seems to peak at just 30MB/s read speed when loading.

Hmmm, that is odd. I wouldn't expect it to slow down at all.

Try 1 and 2 here: 4 Solutions to SanDisk SSD Slow in Windows 10, 8, 7 (diskpart.com) and see if it makes any difference.

I believe that hibernation is already turned off, and peeking at the BIOS (I am deathly afraid of even opening it up, I will be honest, paranoid about somehow accidentally breaking something I shouldn't) seems to suggest that it already is in AHCI mode? Within the BIOS, SATA mode was listed as AHCI, and there are two 'Standard SATA AHCI Controller' devices in device manager, which googling says is an indicator that it's enabled.