Corsair Force NVMe PCIe M.2 240GB - slow?

pugheaven · 21 May 2020 at 00:34

schumi84 said:
Just wanted to jump on this thread so apologies for the hijack as I have an MP510 480GB that also holds my OS and my benchmark results seem a bit strange as well, mostly the Writes though.

I have the drive installed in the top m2 slot on my motherboard (B450 Mortar Titanium) after I realised that I had orginally installed it in the bottom slot which only allows half the speed. When it was installed in that slot the Read was halved (as you'd expect) however the write stayed the same at around the 550-600MB/s.

I thought it might be a temperature issue but from the Samsung Magician software it reads the drive at around 50 degrees C so my only other theory is free space.

I have a second NVMe installed in the bottom slot, a WD 500GB Blue and that is recording the correct speeds (1600MB/s Read & 1450MB/s Write) so is there something obvious I'm missing?

Thanks

I'm no expert fella as I'm using old gear, but is there something on that B450 board where if you have both of the M2's populated, does that lower the bandwidth or something mad? Like I say, I'm working through PCIE3.0 slots so I'm showing full bandwidth on both seperate NMVe drives, but that's well odd that you're getting slow writes. Just for interest, if you swap the NMVe drives around, do you get the same pattern, i.e. th top slot getting slow writes?

pugheaven · 21 May 2020 at 00:40

Infact this is interesting if it's the MSI board mate... there could be a problem both populated at same time./.. take the bottom one out and leabe the top one in, do the writes change?

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/b450-m-2-device-support.249852/

M2_1 supported by the CPU???
M2_2 supported by the B450 chipset???

schumi84 · 21 May 2020 at 19:59

When I had the Corsair in the M2_2 as the only NVMe drive installed it had 550MB/s writes as well. The WD installed in the M2_2 is getting 1600MB/s Read & 1450MB/s Write and that's with the Corsair also installed in the M2_1

Everything is fast enough but I just thought it was a bit strange. I'll try the Corsair installed by itself in the M2_1 and see what happens.

Cheers for the reply

schumi84 · 21 May 2020 at 20:46

Quick update after a quick sanity check.

I took out the M2_2 populated drive (WD NVMe) and also disconnected the Samsung 850 Evo SSD I had plugged into one of the SATA and ran the tests again with just the Corsair MP510 in the M2_1 slot and got exactly the same result.

When I have a bit more time I will take them out again and pop the WD into the M2_1 slot to see if I get its full rating (around 2400MB/s I believe).

father-ted · 22 May 2020 at 19:46

Mine behaved like that until I realised it was set to gen4 in bios.
Changed it to gen3 and it worked at the correct speed.

Have you checked that?

schumi84 · 24 May 2020 at 15:57

Hi there, I had a look round the BIOS for settings relating to storage but couldn't see anything obvious.

I'll see if there is anything in there that points to gen 3/4.

Cheers

father-ted · 25 May 2020 at 09:36

It will be in bios somewhere.

Use the "Primary" M.2 slot
ACPI enabled
CSM support enabled
PCI bus from "Auto" to "Gen 3"

schumi84 · 25 May 2020 at 10:58

Thanks for that info father-ted, below are the screenshots of my current setup and all looks in order. I have switched round the NVMe drives and you can see that the WD drive that is now in the primary slot is operating at its full speed so I do wonder whether there is something wrong with the Corsair MP510?

father-ted · 25 May 2020 at 17:56

Strange then, could be faulty.
Somebody on here more knowledgeable than me will help further.

schumi84 · 14 Jun 2020 at 13:13

Just thought I should update this thread after making progress with the suspected dodgy drive.

I logged a ticket with Corsair to get their opinion on the issue and basically was advised to do a format of the drive to see if it behaved differently afterwards, however as the MP510 is my OS disk it was going to involved some backups and prep work beforehand. As a basic test I dug out an old spare Samsung F1 7200RPM 500GB drive I had lying around and got Windows 10 installed on it, leaving all of my other drives connected.

This is where things get a bit strange as after I got Windows deployed I installed CrystalDisk and using all of the standard drivers that Windows installs I ran the benchmark on the MP510 and the write results improved massively (from 650MB/s to around the 1000MB/s). I gave the PC a reboot, ran the benchmark again and the results improved again to the rated speed of the drive - 2100MB/s write. To note, the read speeds stayed at the rated speed of 3500MB/s.
.

At this point I shut the PC down, disconnected the temporary OS disk, gave the MP510 a reformat and did a fresh install of Windows 10 on it. Once I had all of the updates/drivers/software installed I gave CrystalDisk another run on the MP510 with it now back as my primary OS disk and the results returned the correct rated speeds.

I have no idea what was going on with it and why it started working all of a sudden but at least it's back to where it should be.

Cheers for all of the input in trying to diagnose the issue.

pugheaven · 14 Jun 2020 at 14:33

That's a bit mad mate, however glad to see you've sorted as that would've been fustrating... some epic speeds there fella... nice work and nice kit!!!

schumi84 · 19 Jun 2020 at 09:49

It was definitely a bit of a strange one and not something I have seen before but glad it's running at its rated speeds now. I wasn't sure how all of the other figures stacked up but I certainly can't complain about the speed and don't appear to be having any NVMe issues that some other Ryzen users are experiencing.