Portable NVME Drive over USB C 3.2 Gen 2 not achieving advertised speeds

Lord Bloobus · March 20, 2021

Title.

I purchased a WD Black 500Gb SN750 NVME to pair with a Sabrent USB 3.2 Type-C NVME enclosure to take advantage of faster transfer speeds over traditional USB drives since I've found most of them to be disappointing for large files. Initialized the drive as GPT and NTFS, connected to my rear 3.2 Gen 2 port with a 6ft cable and the speed maxed at 35MB/s, realized I was an idiot and switched to the shorter cable that was included with the drive enclosure and was able to achieve 180MB/s with a single large file which is still just 15% of what USB 3.2 Gen 2 is rated for (10 Gbps).

Decided to run CrystalDisk to see what it was running at there and the results were improved but , results are below. Trying to determine where my bottleneck is as all my stuff should theoretically mesh together and achieve the advertised speed rating across the 3.2 Gen 2 standard.

I'm leaning towards needing to buy a different cable or maybe it's a BIOS issue since they are still releasing patches, but am wondering if anyone else has any recommendations on things to check. PC Specs are in my sig as well.

TechJezus · March 20, 2021

In crystal you are getting around 90% of advertised performance, which sounds good to me. When you are transfering a file to the ssd, what kind of hard drive are you transfering from?

Lord Bloobus · March 20, 2021

5 minutes ago, TechJezus said:

In crystal you are getting around 90% of advertised performance, which sounds good to me. When you are transfering a file to the ssd, what kind of hard drive are you transfering from?

Me being an idiot again, I was transferring from a HDD with the 180MB/s result, NVME to NVME is peaking at 680MB/s with an irregular file load. Which is still less than the advertised 10Gbps which comes out to ~1250MB/s. So issue is still present, and curious where the bottleneck exists.

TechJezus · March 21, 2021

The ssd enclosure is advertised as "up to 1000 mb/s". In real life you wont reach the theoretical limit of 10 gbps. Here is a image of a test of different usb generations.

Lord Bloobus · March 21, 2021

6 hours ago, TechJezus said:

The ssd enclosure is advertised as "up to 1000 mb/s". In real life you wont reach the theoretical limit of 10 gbps. Here is a image of a test of different usb generations.

Had missed the "up to" part so thanks, but I'm still looking to make up my lesser transfer rate in real world performance as it's clearly marked out there, and it should be possible to push it closer to the 10Gbps speed, I think they're lowballing in the product page anyways. I've got a new cable on the way and will be testing some things to get it pushed higher.