New nvme drive trouble spiking at 100% when copying froma a hard disk

[FeedzMe]

Hello guys. I have an issue with my brand new nvme m.2 ssd from gigabyte (link to ssd). Due to lack of more than one m.2 slot on my asus b350-f gaming I had to use a pcie adapter for the ssd (link to adapter) which I put in the bottommost pcie slot which is an x4 gen 2.0 slot. Since I will be only using this ssd for a steam game library the actual pcie 2.0 bandwidth bottleneck with this ssd doesn't bother me since there is no gain in game load times past the speeds of SATA ssds.

The problem I have are random spikes of 100% drive usage when copying game files from a 1tb 5400 hdd during which time the hard disk usage drops to near 0% (see picture)

Disk 0 being the 5400rpm hdd and disk 4 being the nvme ssd.

I have no idea if this is normal performance but in my opinion the nvme m.2 really shouldn't be hitting 100% usage when copying files from a 5400rpm drive to it.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Husky]

It looks like a cache is filling up and then being synced all at once. Does the Windows file copy dialog show a decrease in speed?

[FeedzMe]

2 minutes ago, Husky said:

It looks like a cache is filling up and then being synced all at once. Does the Windows file copy dialog show a decrease in speed?

Yes it does. It shows a brief but harsh reduction in speed from the range of 100MB/S to something like 10 MB/S for a brief moment and then continuing normally up until it does it again. Is there anything that can be done in this case?

[IAcKI]

The dips seem to correlate quite well with the spikes on Drive G.

 

But then also peak on the SSD as soon as they drop on Drive G. Seems like an odd queuing issue. Is it the same when copying from other drives?

[Husky]

1 minute ago, FeedzMe said:

Yes it does. It shows a brief but harsh reduction in speed from the range of 100MB/S to something like 10 MB/S for a brief moment and then continuing normally up until it does it again. Is there anything that can be done in this case?

Can you check the temperature of the drive to make sure that it is not overheating? It might be overheating and then throttling itself to a standstill until it cools down.

[FeedzMe]

Just now, Husky said:

Can you check the temperature of the drive to make sure that it is not overheating? It might be overheating and then throttling itself to a standstill until it cools down.

Will do a benchmark but seems unlikely since it has ample airflow.

[Husky]

Just now, FeedzMe said:

Will do a benchmark but seems unlikely since it has ample airflow.

Have you installed the correct drivers for your SATA AHCI controller and for the NVMe drive (if it has drivers on Gigabyte's website)? Does the issue happen when copying to another drive as well? (as @IAcKI asked)

[.Apex.]

1 minute ago, FeedzMe said:

Yes it does. It shows a brief but harsh reduction in speed from the range of 100MB/S to something like 10 MB/S for a brief moment and then continuing normally up until it does it again. Is there anything that can be done in this case?

You're copying from an HDD it's normal for it to behave like that since game files come in varying file sizes which hits the HDD differently, my SSD usage copying from HDD is also spiky since it's so much faster it waits for the HDD to transfer enough data to copy over.

 

Check your SSD performance, and try copying from SSD to SSD or from the same SSD, as long as it's fine then everything is fine.

[FeedzMe]

6 minutes ago, Husky said:

Have you installed the correct drivers for your SATA AHCI controller and for the NVMe drive (if it has drivers on Gigabyte's website)? Does the issue happen when copying to another drive as well? (as @IAcKI asked)

 

9 minutes ago, IAcKI said:

The dips seem to correlate quite well with the spikes on Drive G.

 

But then also peak on the SSD as soon as they drop on Drive G. Seems like an odd queuing issue. Is it the same when copying from other drives?

Okay so gigabyte provide no drivers apart from an ssd overview utility so no I haven't installed anything. 

Temps: 

they sit around 50 degrees during usage I don't know where the max of 59 came from since I have been watching it the whole time of the bench.

Here are the speeds and usages when copying from an SATA ssd. The two dips in the graph correlate with drops of speed to 5 MB/S and also usage spike of 100% on the nvme m.2.  

In the attachments there is also a screenshot of copying the files from the nvme ssd back to the hard drive .

[.Apex.]

17 minutes ago, FeedzMe said:

Performance looks fine, I don't understand why you're paying attention to how the usage reacts, It's just how windows queues up the data, it's difficult to make any sense of it unless there's an issue.

[RageTester]

Try to keep drive temperature under 45 degrees to extend life...

HDD is slower than SSD, it's really trying hard to keep up, you can't write data that are not ready so SSD has to wait.

[FeedzMe]

21 minutes ago, _Syn_ said:

Performance looks fine, I don't understand why you're paying attention to how the usage reacts, It's just how windows queues up the data, it's difficult to make any sense of it unless there's an issue.

 

 

1 hour ago, Husky said:

Have you installed the correct drivers for your SATA AHCI controller and for the NVMe drive (if it has drivers on Gigabyte's website)? Does the issue happen when copying to another drive as well? (as @IAcKI asked)

Thank you all. I had no idea if this is correct behaviour or if there is anything wrong.