My Gen4 SSD is slower than my sata ssd

[KhandakeF]

Hello. I have a Micron 3400 SSD and a Crucial MX500 that I just bought. The Micron came with the laptop(11th gen Predator Helios) and I've had it for about 2 years now

 

In CrystalDIskMark, the Micron is showing much slower speeds than my MX500. I know SSDs degrade as you read/write more from it, but does it have this much of an impact in just 2 years?

Micron 3400

 

 

MX500

[YoungBlade]

Those speeds are impossible on a SATA drive. I'm guessing you have a RAM cache of some kind going.

[Tetras]

Umm. Your MX500 has some kind of turbocharger fitted 

 

Are you using momentumcache (I think that's what they call it?)?

[mariushm]

Micron 3400 is the OEM version of Crucial P5 Plus , which is reviewed here : https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-p5-plus-m2-nvme-ssd-review/2

 

Drive's 78% full, so only 22% free ...  the 2 TB model in the review above had 200 GB of SLC write cache, so the 1 TB model would have 100 GB of SLC cache, and the 500 GB would have around 50 GB of SLC cache at most. But that SLC write cache can be only if there's enough disk space ... TLC stores 3 bits per cell, so you'd need 150 GB of free disk space to have 50 GB of SLC write cache.

 

You have 104 GB of free disk space, so probably less than 30-40 GB of SLC write cache, and most likely a part of that write cache is used already by other things that you installed recently. The write speed is a bit low but not impossible considering. May be improved by running a TRIM (run defrag on the ssd, the defrag tool will just issue a trim and let the ssd do garbage collection, flush the write caches, etc etc and that could improve write speeds)

 

The sata drive, you have something that caches the content in ram, and skews up everything. You're basically testing the ram.

[goatedpenguin]

I can confirm that you are using a momentum cache I have a mx500 ssd from crucial, its normal read and writes on crystal diskmark is around 500 and 300 when enabled my performance jumped to 10594 read and 9487 write I have never heard of this feature now my drive is exponentially faster lmao.

 

[KhandakeF]

2 hours ago, Tetras said:

Umm. Your MX500 has some kind of turbocharger fitted 

 

Are you using momentumcache (I think that's what they call it?)?

 

1 hour ago, goatedpenguin said:

I can confirm that you are using a momentum cache I have a mx500 ssd from crucial, its normal read and writes on crystal diskmark is around 500 and 300 when enabled my performance jumped to 10594 read and 9487 write I have never heard of this feature now my drive is exponentially faster lmao.

 

I did enable momentum cache. I didn't know it would do this LOL

 

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

Micron 3400 is the OEM version of Crucial P5 Plus , which is reviewed here : https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-p5-plus-m2-nvme-ssd-review/2

 

Drive's 78% full, so only 22% free ...  the 2 TB model in the review above had 200 GB of SLC write cache, so the 1 TB model would have 100 GB of SLC cache, and the 500 GB would have around 50 GB of SLC cache at most. But that SLC write cache can be only if there's enough disk space ... TLC stores 3 bits per cell, so you'd need 150 GB of free disk space to have 50 GB of SLC write cache.

 

You have 104 GB of free disk space, so probably less than 30-40 GB of SLC write cache, and most likely a part of that write cache is used already by other things that you installed recently. The write speed is a bit low but not impossible considering. May be improved by running a TRIM (run defrag on the ssd, the defrag tool will just issue a trim and let the ssd do garbage collection, flush the write caches, etc etc and that could improve write speeds)

 

The sata drive, you have something that caches the content in ram, and skews up everything. You're basically testing the ram.

Huh, I didn't know about this actually. Interesting

[SlayerOfHellWyrm]

2 hours ago, KhandakeF said:

MX500

 

So, these speeds on your SEQ, are not possible for a SATA drive. The SATA protocol tops out realistically, around 600 MB/s. Why are you seeing 8380 MB/s then? You have a write cache enabled. Given the drive in question, it's Crucial's Momentum Cache which caches SEQ read and writes to your RAM. RAM, is hilariously faster than NVMe and so you end up with what you're seeing. 

You'll notice 2 things. 1) If you disable that cache, your speeds will plummet on the sequential to the 500 - 550 mark where they should be, and 2) when doing that test with the cache enabled, watch your RAM. It's going to spike in usage from the caching.

Your Micron is 100% faster, and if you cached it with your RAM would be even faster, barring other bottlenecks. 

[goatedpenguin]

gotta say this momentum cache shit made my ssd 2x faster than my nvme, literally puts my ssd on steroids. On a more serious note though, I would only advise doing this on a system that has more than 8gb of RAM since it uses 25% of your system's RAM which could be a performance hit.

[KhandakeF]

7 hours ago, goatedpenguin said:

gotta say this momentum cache shit made my ssd 2x faster than my nvme, literally puts my ssd on steroids. On a more serious note though, I would only advise doing this on a system that has more than 8gb of RAM since it uses 25% of your system's RAM which could be a performance hit.

I have 32 gigs