NVME drive running at 66% speed

gi1242 · 2025-08-30 00:12:30

Hi All,

I just got a new NVME drive. When I plugged it in yesterday, it was giving me a solid 3 gbps speed. Today, it only gives me 2gbps; and that seems to vary. On some boots it was giving me as low as 1.5 gbps.

I've been trying to see if there was any bios / hardware setting I might have missed; but I can't seem to find anything useful. Does any one have any tips?

Not sure if it's useful, but here's my hardware info:

* Motherboard: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z390M-ITXac/index.asp

* Drive: Samsung SSD 980 500GB (M.2) (PCIe 3.0 x4, supported by motherboard)

* No graphics card, and nothing else in PCIe, so the system should be free to use everything on the M2 drive.

* Tweaked the bios, but couldn't find any relevant setting that might make a differece.

Thanks in advance,

GI

seth · 2025-08-30 07:41:10

yesterday, it was giving me a solid 3 gbps speed. Today, it only gives me 2gbps

Measured how?
What happened/changed between yesterday and today?
Have you accounted for pot. sideload (eg. by a file indexer, i think "tracker" on gnome and "baloo" on KDE - could be random other stuff, though)?
Limitation on the other end?
CPU bottleneck?
ASPM? Generally powersaving related (TLP etc)?

gi1242 · 2025-08-30 12:52:13

seth wrote:

Measured how?

I used`hdparm -tT`, and `hdparm -tT --direct`

seth wrote:

What happened/changed between yesterday and today?

The only thing that changed was I moved my root partition to the new NVMe drive.

seth wrote:

Have you accounted for pot. sideload (eg. by a file indexer, i think "tracker" on gnome and "baloo" on KDE - could be random other stuff, though)?

I ran iotop to make sure nothing else was suing the disk when I tested...

seth wrote:

Limitation on the other end?
CPU bottleneck?
ASPM? Generally powersaving related (TLP etc)?

I don't know what ASPM is, or TLP. I poked around in the bios and changed so many settings that the computer wouldn't wake up from sleep anymore. I had to factory reset it again...

THanks for your response; any suggestions / thoughts welcome.

I saw one post that suggested staying in BIOS for 20 seconds to allow the drive to heat up. Might try that...

seth · 2025-08-30 16:15:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_St … Management - adding "pcie_aspm=off" to the https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_parameters will disable it.
Might also be APST, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_ … ST_support (ignore the symptoms, there's an explanation for how to disable that)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/TLP

The only thing that changed was I moved my root partition to the new NVMe drive.

Do you get the expected performance from the install iso? And after chrooting into the installed system from the iso?

gi1242 · 2025-08-31 02:12:51

OK, I was testing it all wrong. hdparm doesn't give an accurate enough test. It works on all my SSD / rotating drives; but I think I need to give the NVMe drives more time to warm up.

There's a nice article on benchmarking here:

https://medium.com/@krisiasty/nvme-stor … b026786297

I followed that and consistently got 2.6gbps; I'm supposed to get 3200 gbps according to vendor specs. But I'm not sure if 1GB=10^9, or 1GB=2^30. Regardless, it was close enough that I don't think I did anything wrong, and the drive is working as expected

seth · 2025-08-31 07:32:34

\o/
Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-08-30 00:12:30

NVME drive running at 66% speed

#2 2025-08-30 07:41:10

Re: NVME drive running at 66% speed

#3 2025-08-30 12:52:13

Re: NVME drive running at 66% speed

#4 2025-08-30 16:15:00

Re: NVME drive running at 66% speed

#5 2025-08-31 02:12:51

Re: NVME drive running at 66% speed

#6 2025-08-31 07:32:34

Re: NVME drive running at 66% speed

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