Hello, I purchased
an Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-53) about 3 months ago on eBay. It's been a great
machine and I'm very pleased overall. My machine came with the 1TB HDD only,
but the original owner put a cheap Silicon Power M.2 SATA 120GB SSD in it. It's not a bad SSD, but I plan on putting a 970 EVO in it's place. In the below
description, all speeds were tested with CrystalDiskMark
Initially, the
laptop came with a 7200 RPM HGST 1TB. I was getting the expected 150mb/s
read/write from the drive. I then swapped it out for a WD Blue 5400 RPM 1TB, as
I had a few laying around. I did this to conserve power and help with battery life (which helped tremendously!).
These are late 2016
models, and are 6Gb/s. In the USB 3.0 enclosure I have, all of them get 150mb/s read/write as well, and these were pulled from working machines, have been
tested, and only have a few hundred hours on them. They all get 150mb/s read/write and about 2-4mb/s on 4K. I made this swap not long after
purchasing the laptop. Initially, everything was fine.
However, as of late,
I've been noticing slow load times in games and overall slow performance from
that disk. So I tested one of the other WDs in my USB 3.0 enclosure, and it ran
fine (150mb/s). The disk install in the laptop is only getting around 50-85mb/s
though, and 4K speeds are horribly low, around .6-.8mb/s. I assumed there was
something wrong with the disk, cloned it to another WD drive and swapped them.
However the new WD drive does the same exact thing, and the original WD gets
150mb/s in the USB enclosure.. So something is clearly wrong with the laptop.
I
updated/reinstalled Intel Rapid Storage, Chipset drivers, I/O drivers, and even
installed the latest 1.22 BIOS that was just released. No change what so ever. (Other than the stupid new keyboard backlight timeout on AC)
I popped the laptop
open to make sure the tiny SATA ribbon cable didn't come loose, and there
doesn't appear to be any damage to it. I'm lost at this point what else could be
going on. Windows 10 has been acting strange lately on this machine, but it's a
fresh install, only about 5 weeks old. I'm also still on 1803. I tested 1809
and it caused nothing but headaches.. So I reimaged. The machine is still in like new condition, and I take very good care of it.
I unfortunately no
longer have the original HGST drive that was in the laptop either to test.
