NVME write/read speed capped at 590-630mb/s

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jarablue

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I have 1 nvme as my windows 10 pro install drive. I have 2 sata wd blue ssds attached on the sata part of my motherboard.

I think something is limiting my nvme WDSN750 from it's potential. I have epic games launcher installed on the c drive. Which is the nvme. I am installing random games from the epic games launcher. In the launcher, when installing the game, the read and write speed never go above 630 MB/s which is odd. Shouldn't the epic game launcher be reading and writing speeds close to the rated speed? It seems as if somewhere in my system, it's configured as a sata drive. At least speed wise for seq writes and reads.

I have the WD ssd toolbox installed and it is reporting to me as in gen3x4 mode which is good. But why am I being limited to such slow write and read speeds? Especially that the speeds being reported are indicative of sata speeds? I know the OS is installed on C as well as the game being installed but it should still write and read more than 600MB, even on the os drive for an nvme..right?

I have the latest bios and everything. Any of you guys know?

Just odd that the nvme is reading and writing at the sata max speed. I have the nvme running in ahci mode NOT using the Intel rst driver or controller in my bios.
 
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Try running a CrystalDiskMark test, that will at least tell you the max the drive can do on your system. It's rare for even NVMe disks to hit their max rated throughput in real use and things like installing games can be affected by CPU so there's potentially a lot of other things at play here.
 
There's nothing taxing my 10700k. I run a lean system. Have 64gb of 3600 mhz memory.

Just find it odd that it's tapping out at sata speeds.
 
Sounds like your NvME drive and sata drives might be maxing out the pcie channels. Check your motherboard specs to see if cetain ssd slots are sharing pcie lanes. Maybe you can move a couple ssd ports around..
 
I am not sharing lanes. I am certain of it. I am using the correct ports on the motherboard to avoid that. Also in the Western Digital SSD dashboard software my nvme is running at full speed which is gen3 X4. I just ran crystaldiskmark and it showed me as having sequential reads of 3400 megabytes and sequential writes of 3050 megabytes. So The Benchmark utility is reporting the correct speed but for some reason the epic games launcher won't install its media at above 600 or so megabytes which is odd. Maybe something to do with the launcher?
 
Sequential reads/writes are not really the true measure of a drives speed in real life situations like installing games with many small random files intertwined with many larger files. IOPS are the most accurate measure of real world speed but are more difficult for people to comprehend relatively.
 
No I hear you. Just odd that it seems to be capped at the sata max for bandwidth. Maybe it's how the launcher works.
 
jarablue said:
No. Epic games launcher displays MegaBytes not Megabits
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Where is the utility in EGS to test this? I'm a little curious to see what it shows on my system.

My EGS game data is on the same drive as my pcie-4 cache and my RAMcache, so if EGS is bottlenecking something I'll definitely notice, as the RAMcache tends to show speeds around 12-16GB/S.
 
If you install a game, you need to download it, click the download menu on the bottom left. There it will show you the read/write/bandwidth graph to what is currently going on. You have to install a game for those graphs to be in use/working. My read and write is always near 600.

Download the game RAGE 2 to test. It's free on the epic store. Awesome that epic gives away free games.
 
If I'm understanding correctly, I believe that your internet speed is the limiting factor here.

Also, given your setup you will never really see the performance of you NVME drive aside from maybe some file caching. But given that you have 32GB of RAM, you'll likely never touch the pagefile. So maybe a bit of a performance gain in initial OS loading time. If you were to add another NVME drive to the system and you passed very large files between them, then you would see the performance. These things aside, most times starting and loading a game or software locally you would see little gains in NVME over a SATA drive anyway.

Either way, don't stress too much about it. Unless you have a special use case or it is negatively affecting the system noticeably, it sounds like you have all of the performance needed, don't worry about the numbers.
 
Libnok said:
If I'm understanding correctly, I believe that your internet speed is the limiting factor here.

Also, given your setup you will never really see the performance of you NVME drive aside from maybe some file caching. But given that you have 32GB of RAM, you'll likely never touch the pagefile. So maybe a bit of a performance gain in initial OS loading time. If you were to add another NVME drive to the system and you passed very large files between them, then you would see the performance. These things aside, most times starting and loading a game or software locally you would see little gains in NVME over a SATA drive anyway.

Either way, don't stress too much about it. Unless you have a special use case or it is negatively affecting the system noticeably, it sounds like you have all of the performance needed, don't worry about the numbers.
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"don't worry about the numbers."

You know we are on hardforum right? ;)
 
jarablue said:
"don't worry about the numbers."

You know we are on hardforum right? ;)
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While I'm a seemingly new member to the [H] family, I've been lurking since about 1996/7. I'm well aware what the OCP stands for. That said, my statement stands, I've been around long enough to where I just want things to work. ;)
 
From my reading, he mentions downloading but he's actually basing his testing on the game install speed. Not sure how accurate that is but I normally just go run Crystal Disk Mark. Epic game launcher isn't really meant to be a benchmark.
 
dvsman said:
From my reading, he mentions downloading but he's actually basing his testing on the game install speed. Not sure how accurate that is but I normally just go run Crystal Disk Mark. Epic game launcher isn't really meant to be a benchmark.
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Agreed, that's a terrible way to gauge drive speed.
 
Game install speed has a lot of unpacking/repacking data so what you're looking at is probably the speed that things are uncompressing.

I decided to give it a shot on my own system, and its showing my "write" speed between 330-550MB/S which seems unlikely given that I'm downloading it to a SATA spinning HDD and because its only downloading at 80MB/S.

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Edit/update:
It's reading at 140MB/S -200MB/S for the "verifying" installation, which seems reasonable considering that its not cached yet. Though that's slowly creeping up, primocache isn't showing it reading from the cache.
 
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If download isn't the limiting factor the speed is going to be determined by a series of other factors including what the installation process is doing. Write speed is also what the average is over a given span of time. Can't speak of Epic, but in my experience my 970 Pro will average 700-900 MB/s, peaking around 1500 MB/s on Steam when not limited by my 25 MB/s internet connection. The SN750 is a slower drive compared to the 970 Pro.
 
Recently I copied a single large file using an SN550, which to my understanding should count as a decent example of sequential write to check a drive's spec'd speeds. I experienced a write speed that remained around 500MBps, while the drive is rated for 950MBps. Idk what the deal is, though haven't tried a synthetic test benchmark yet.

The drive is in the topmost m.2 slot and the only other PCIe slot being utilized is the GPU (though I wasn't using it at the time).
 
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