[SOLVED] Will my Asrock Z370-pro4's Ultra M.2 Gen3 x4 support the full speed of a Gen4 x4, because Asrock's Ultra series supports 32 Gb/s?

[FretlFam]

I have wanted to upgrade my storage for a while, and M.2 is the way. But I have a lot of doubt when it comes to speed, as I would like the most speed for my buck. My MB is the Asrock Z370-Pro4 and it has the Asrock Ultra M.2 slots running up to 32 Gb/s or 4000MB/s on a gen3 x4. But I was wondering if a gen4 x4 at 5000MB/s would still run at those speeds, or be limited to the 4000MB/s because the motherboard doesn't allow faster read/write? I am mostly in doubt because the motherboard is outdated, and has not been tested with faster speed gen3 x4's before.

Or will a 4000MB/s gen4 x4 still be doing worse compared to a gen3 x4 at 4000MB/s since the motherboard is made for gen3?

Thanks in advance, and have a nice day.

 

[siaan312]

The "Ultra m.2" is a BS marketing term that means nothing.
It's a regular old nvme/sata m.2 slot.
That 32Gb/s is not what you think it is. It's 32 Gigabit not Gigabyte.
byte = 8 bits. divide that 32 by 8 and get 4 gigabytes like any other gen 3x4 m.2 slot
An ssd using pci-e gen 3 4x cannot be faster than 3.5-4 Gigabytes per second, because of that m.2 slot, but it wouldn't run faster even if it was on a 4x slot.
It also works the other way around, a gen 4 drive in a gen 3 slot would run at the weakest link in the chain.


I would also like to point out that a gen 4 drive is not meaningfully faster than a gen 3 drive.
For almost ALL use cases, that 600mb/s or that 3500 mb/s or that 7000 mb/s means absolutly nothing. Those are sequential numbers that are not close to anything real world.
The performance the average user needs is the random IO, measured in IOPS, but is also quite misleading as it depends on the qdepth of the IOPS test.
But either way, any SSD, even a sata one, is FARRRR above a hard drive in this regard, but the problem is, the difference between SSDs is not that big, especially between m.2 drives. A gen 3 and a gen 4 will usually feel EXACTLY the same in day to day use.

 

[Bob.B]

I have wanted to upgrade my storage for a while, and M.2 is the way. But I have a lot of doubt when it comes to speed, as I would like the most speed for my buck. My MB is the Asrock Z370-Pro4 and it has the Asrock Ultra M.2 slots running up to 32 Gb/s or 4000MB/s on a gen3 x4. But I was wondering if a gen4 x4 at 5000MB/s would still run at those speeds, or be limited to the 4000MB/s because the motherboard doesn't allow faster read/write? I am mostly in doubt because the motherboard is outdated, and has not been tested with faster speed gen3 x4's before.

Or will a 4000MB/s gen4 x4 still be doing worse compared to a gen3 x4 at 4000MB/s since the motherboard is made for gen3?

Thanks in advance, and have a nice day.

The gen4 ssd should run at gen3 speed.