PO5-615 how to fix slow SSD speeds?

i recently updated to the new bios firmware for my PO5-615s desktop and ever since then my write speeds have been really low. i used to get ~2200 for read and ~1200 for write, these are the advertised specs. now i get ~2000 read and ~150-350 for write speeds which is quite a big difference. also i notice that im able to see my nvme and my hdd in the peripherals tab of my bios but on boot option tab, i never saw my ssd there. my ssd is where windows is installed. in disk management on windows, my C drive (OS) is listed as disk 1 while my hdd (storage) is listed as disk 0. all of this is confusing to me but hopefully this info can help some smarter people undertsand my situation.

{Thread was edited to add model name to the title}

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AnhEZ28

@mocha try to check the temperature of the SSD with crystal disk info. Also, you can try to do a power reset by unplugging the power cable and holding the power button for 10 secs.

billsey

I am assuming you have your UEFI setup correct, so you are actually booting from the SSD and not the HDD (The HDD should have only one partition shown in Disk Management, the SSD three or four). You can ignore what you see in the Boot Priority settings in the BIOS, you are using UEFI so the boot menu only shows devices that are UEFI Boot enabled, so GPT with EFI boot images. The huge change in write speeds leads me to believe your issue is software rather than drive temperature, although higher drive temperature might be a symptom of the software changes. Something is slowing those writes down, perhaps something is writing in the background pretty much all the time? Try using Resource Monitor to see if you have some task that's logging to disk...

mocha

im not seeing anything in resource monitor that would be causing this sort of problem. i know i did some benchmarks before getting a new ram kit and speeds were fine. i changed my ram and a few days later i updated the bios firmware. now i dont know if its for one of those reasons or when i decided to change from rst premium to ahci in bios but im almost certain that i had changed it because i was getting slow speeds and tried to troubleshoot myself by changing to ahci from reading stuff online and knowing that none of the drives acer sends with this desktop is rst or optane capable i decided to go and give that a try and now im out of ideas. i know its not from temps either because i could test while the pc was on for hours/gaming and all was good, now its slow right from the start.

mocha

i probably shouldnt of change from rst to ahci since it came with rst but when i was trying to look for ideas a lot of threads were saying to try ahci and since rst is discontinued and the service in windows 10 would throw an error whenever i tried to turn it on i went ahead and tried ahci

billsey

iRST is going to run a bit faster than AHCI, you only need AHCI when installing an OS that doesn't support iRST. What RAM did you install? Is it XMP? If so it likely dropped your memory to a much slower speed than stock...

mocha

yes its a 3200mhz xmp corsair vengeance rgb pro with xmp enabled in bios. could that actually make my ssd slower?

billsey

Yes. The Predator PO5-615s models use a X490 chipset and don't have XMP enabled by default, so XMP memory will run at the base JEDEC speed, not the overclocked XMP speed. Your system came with either 2666 or 3200 memory and my guess is the memory you added pulls the system down to 2133 instead (that's a common base speed for XMP enabled memory). That would give you the symptom of running everything, including SSD access, at a much slower speed since everything goes through memory. Fire up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab and take a look at the running memory speed... If you want to run the XMP memory overclocked, you have to go into the BIOS; Advanced; CPU and Chipset and enable eXtreme Memory Profile support.

StevenGen

mocha said:

i recently updated to the new bios firmware for my PO5-615s desktop and ever since then my write speeds have been really low. i used to get ~2200 for read and ~1200 for write, these are the advertised specs. now i get ~2000 read and ~150-350 for write speeds which is quite a big difference. also i notice that im able to see my nvme and my hdd in the peripherals tab of my bios but on boot option tab, i never saw my ssd there. my ssd is where windows is installed. in disk management on windows, my C drive (OS) is listed as disk 1 while my hdd (storage) is listed as disk 0. all of this is confusing to me but hopefully this info can help some smarter people undertsand my situation.
{Thread was edited to add model name to the title}

The PO5-615 desktops has the following drive specs:
1. 2 x Key M M.2 2242/2280 slot for SSD and optane memory, supports PCIe or SATA signal
2. Integrated four SATA 6Gb/s Host Controllers

Disk 0 is always the boot drive while Disk 1 is the slave drive in Disk Management, in bios you should have these boot priorities:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/ud/aifzjbgk5y6p.jpg

Your CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4b tests (if that is what you are testing it with?) must be testing your PO5-615's SATA drive and not the NVMe M.2 drive as and also you should have the Advanced default setting for "Onboard SATA Mode" at "RST with Optane" and not anything else. The NVME Port1/2 should be (Enabled) as "This item shows the information of the NVME port 1/2" if you use an NVMe M.2 drive as a boot drive. Also make sure that you have TRIM enabled within windows as that also assists SSD drive to perform to its peak performance.

This is what my Nitro AN515-56 laptops OEM Acer M.2 NVMe the WD NS530 512GB boot drive speeds are and yours should be similar but it depends on the NVMe drive that you use

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/r2/9sqf5n45psmj.jpg

mocha

yes my memory runs at 3200mhz in task manager cause i have enabled xmp in bios already. my NVMe Samsung MZVLQ512HALU-00000 is where my OS is installed and i have a 2TB hard drive for storage. but in disk management for some reason my 2TB is listed as disk 0 and my NVMe is listed as disk 1 which is very confusing. in my bios when i go to the boot priority page, i dont see my NVMe to boot from, i only see one hard disk which is my 2TB. this has always been the case since having this computer. OS was always installed on my NVMe and both drives show in the peripherals tab but for boot order/priority its never shown my NVMe as a optional boot device. i have no idea why other than maybe cause windows chooses my 2TB as disk 0? i honestly have no idea.

even with bios not showing NVMe as an optional boot device and showing as disk 1 in disk management, i was still able to get advertised speeds in crystaldiskmark before i got my new ram, updated bios and went from rst with optane to ahci. im back on ahci now but speeds are still lower than usual.

https://imgur.com/a/JzJvunx

mocha

images of my bios

https://imgur.com/a/JKg9Jp1
https://imgur.com/a/NU88Z4h

billsey

You can just ignore the whole boot options page, Windows Boot Manager is first in the list and that's what is used. Same thing with the disk enumeration, you are booting from the NVMe SSD and it doesn't matter is it's listed as disk 0 or disk 12. Specs on your drive are 2200 reads and 1200 writes and your reads aren't too much down from that, but the writes are really low. That is why I started with the possibility that something in the background was doing writes, eating up a good portion of the bandwidth. It would be worthwhile to remove the new XMP memory and disable XMP overclocking in the BIOS, then rerun the benchmarks to see if things go back to normal.

mocha

i just finished swapping back to the old ram and still have the same problem. could it be possible the new bios update (R01-A3) did this? or maybe when i changed from rst premium to ahci then back to rst premium? if so how would i go about fixing that?

mocha

ok so i seem to have found the fix. i uninstalled my ssd in device manager, restarted my pc then tested and still had slow write speeds. i then went into policies, unticked write caching and then re-enabled it and voila my write speeds are back to normal. i have no idea why this is the case, seems like an odd glitch of some sort. thanks for clearing some things on this nonetheless!