Adata NVME throttling below SATA speed.

[DexterTheBester]

I have a 512 GB AData XPG SX8200 Pro NVMe SSD running in a Windows 10 system with all latest updates on a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite motherboard under the heatsink (temperatures never go above 46-48 degrees Celsius even under load, idle is 36-38). Even though CrystalDiskMark shows absolutely fine numbers for an NVME (screenshot below), in games I experienced a spike in loading times when I reinstalled them from my 7200 RPM hard drive (!). Loading a game started taking about 1.25-1.5 times what it took on an HDD. When I tried a sequential transfer of a 19GB folder worth of mp4 video from HDD to SSD, for the first 1-2 seconds the speeds are high in the 1.5-1.7GB/s mark which is up to spec, and then quickly fall below 150 MB/s and sometimes even below 100MB/s which makes the whole transfer take a lot of time. Again, it's not thermal throttling, temperatures are well contained. TRIM command is enabled and I already tried formatting the drive. I suspect it has something to do with SLC caching which can explain sequential speeds, but games are random reads/writes, they're not supposed to be so slow.

[Chris Pratt]

Random 4K is going to be much slower. That's normal. These aren't "SATA" speeds, because a SATA drive would be getting even lower numbers there. It's also much faster than HDD, where you'd be speaking in KB/s, not even MB/s.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

13 minutes ago, DexterTheBester said:

from HDD to SSD

This transfer will be limited by the HDD read speed.

[HanZie82]

Reinstall the games directly to the NVME might work.

 

Also where are you copying the 19GB file from? Sounds like the read speed of the disk its coming from is the limiting factor.

 

[Hold-Ma-Beer]

What about Dram cache?

[HanZie82]

1 minute ago, Hold-Ma-Beer said:

What about Dram cache?

Why ask, the complete SSD model is there...

[Chris Pratt]

3 minutes ago, Hold-Ma-Beer said:

What about Dram cache?

DRAM cache is fine. If you run a quick Google Image Search for CrystalDisk benchmarks mentioning this drive, they're all comparable. If anything, the OP seems to be doing a little better than average.

[HanZie82]

4 hours ago, DexterTheBester said:

I have a 512 GB AData XPG SX8200 Pro NVMe SSD running in a Windows 10 system with all latest updates on a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite motherboard

Its the first sentence, and YES that SSD does have a DDR3 dram cache. (altho i dont know how big).

And also, SSD's might be fast but for game loading theres so much more that comes into play.
My new system thats on all non-mechenical and quadruple the cores, memory, speed and all that yet it only loads games about 25% faster in general.
It might have been a bit to high expectations.