Question Why is the Samsung 970 Evo Plus giving only half sequential read/write speeds on my device?

[tanay24]

I recently installed the Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500Gb on my device HP Pavilion 15-ck069tx. I cloned my C drive to it using Samsung's Data Migration software and currently, I'm using it as the boot drive. Strangely when I checked for the benchmarks on both Samsung's Magician and the Crystal Disk Mark it's giving me around 1800MB/s as sequential read /write speeds and sometimes even below that. I also checked the number of PCIe lanes that the drive is currently using in HWiNFO and there it says current link width x4. Also in Samsung's Magician, it says PCIe v 3.0 x4 under the Interface section, and also the firmware, BIOS, and Samsung's NVMe driver are at their latest versions. So I'm certainly not able to figure out any specific reasons for the low sequential read/write speeds. One thing I noticed that the drive temperatures reach pretty high at around 83 degrees even after running just one benchmark test and it's at around 45 to 55 degrees when the drive is idle. I don't know if that's normal and it may be a potential reason for the low speeds.
Thanks for any help, if you need any more info please let me know!

 

[Maxxify]

Laptops often throttle to two lanes.

 

[mdd1963]

I'd be surprised the drive worked at all at 83C/load temps...(in other words, I concur with the above suspected throttle cause)

 

[tanay24]

Yes, I think that these temperatures are definitely one of the reasons and hence due to thermal throttling the speeds are reduced considerably. (Today it reached a shocking 94 C after I ran the benchmarks again while performing some other tasks simultaneously, although the results were the same.) I hope that the drive is not defective or something like that.

Also, if I install a thin heatsink onto the drive then will I get the advertised sequential read/write speeds or any noticeable performance improvements? Provided that I'll have to check how much clearance do I have between the drive and the case.