WD SN850 Slower than expected performance

[monkeyboy46800]

Still not convinced though, Guru3D manages to get over 4000 MB/s with one of their Gen4 drives on the review they made, im still hitting 3 GB/s wall even after disabling thunderbolt, SATA, WiFi, Ethernet, Onboard audio: https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asrock_x570_phantom_gaming_itxtb3_review,17.html

 

[Sihastru]

I couldn't find the diagram on the product site, so I did assume they might do that, going through the chipset. It doesn't make sense, since they only have a single TB3 port, the TB chipset would've worked fine trough the X570 chipset, but I guess at the time of design, we only had Gen3 SSDs or only 5GB/s Gen4s.

That's not what's happening. I understand that there's some overhead going through the chipset and that is probably why you get 6GB/s reads. But that's still 6GB/s, just 1GB/s shy of the drive specifications. The writes are at 3GB/s, about 2GB shy of the drive specifications, but, more importantly, 3GB short of the reads the slot is capable of. A shared connection is detrimental when the things that share it are fighting for bandwidth. But during your test, they are not, as demonstrated by the read speeds.

Your TB3 interface is probably using the lanes from the CPU, which is probably why the M.2 NVMe is relegated to the chipset. So it shouldn't interfere with the shared bandwidth.

So AsRock is talking horse manure.

EDIT: So everything goes through the chipset. Great design AsRock! /s

 

[tabascosauz]

Here is a reply from Asrock technical department which came in last night, seems like the one and only M.2 slot is actually running over the chipset, I do have a Sata3 SSD and Thunderbolt 3 10GB/s network card which I guess could be limiting the x4 lanes on the chipset.

View attachment 189451

Just blows my mind that ASRock saw fit to intentionally route the only M.2 slot off the chipset. Just gotta be different, huh - typical ASSRock.

I would say that your only bet is to see if any owners of the B550 Vision D, X570 Creator, or X570 Aqua can put a PCIe 4.0 drive in a chipset slot and test, as only those boards have a Titan Ridge TB controller like yours. Something to do with both the NVMe and Titan Ridge coming off the X570 PCH.

I'm guessing Guru3D tested with a 4.0 drive, but didn't connect any TB3 devices.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Here is a reply from Asrock technical department which came in last night, seems like the one and only M.2 slot is actually running over the chipset, I do have a Sata3 SSD and Thunderbolt 3 10GB/s network card which I guess could be limiting the x4 lanes on the chipset.

View attachment 189451

Wow, that's a naff board layout by ASRock.
Why would they have done that and just wasted the lanes from the CPU??

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Well here is my reply to Asrock, lets see what they have to say:

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Hi All,

So official response from Asrock is that they have tested the SN850 on my board in the M.2 slot and they see the same behaviour.
They have also tested the SN850 on other vendor board's running the SSD on the chipset slot and they also see the low write speed.
Which must mean then that the SN850 has issue to run on X570 chipset lanes.
Asrock confirmed to me that they reached out to WD who have also confirmed the low speed when running across the chipset lanes and that this is a limitation of the drive.

Somehow I smell BS, but would need to do further testing.


@W1zzard , any chance when you do your next NVME Gen 4 Review, that you could pop your SN850 in M.2 slot that runs through the chipset, and check write speed ?

 

[Hachi_Roku256563]

Hi All,

So official response from Asrock is that they have tested the SN850 on my board in the M.2 slot and they see the same behaviour.
They have also tested the SN850 on other vendor board's running the SSD on the chipset slot and they also see the low write speed.
Which must mean then that the SN850 has issue to run on X570 chipset lanes.
Asrock confirmed to me that they reached out to WD who have also confirmed the low speed when running across the chipset lanes and that this is a limitation of the drive.

Somehow I smell BS, but would need to do further testing.


@W1zzard , any chance when you do your next NVME Gen 4 Review, that you could pop your SN850 in M.2 slot that runs through the chipset, and check write speed ?

View attachment 189923

So to summarise it was a bios bug and you got a free tb of disk
i was right YAY!

 

[monkeyboy46800]

So to summarise it was a bios bug and you got a free tb of disk
i was right YAY!

What makes you say bios bug ?

 

[TheLostSwede]

What makes you say bios bug ?

Because other drives don't behave like that going via the chipset.

ASRock is full of crap, as there is no limitation to the extent you're seeing.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Because other drives don't behave like that going via the chipset.

ASRock is full of crap, as there is no limitation to the extent you're seeing.

Mmmmm, more like firmware bug on the SSD when running over X570 chipsets, not only my board but others too apparently:

 

[TheLostSwede]

Mmmmm, more like firmware bug on the SSD when running over X570 chipsets, not only my board but others too apparently:

View attachment 189926

But only a few people are having this issue, so that doesn't make sense.

 

[tabascosauz]

Mmmmm, more like firmware bug on the SSD when running over X570 chipsets, not only my board but others too apparently:

View attachment 189926

I mean hey, if it gives you consolation on your ASRock purchase..."we tested some other motherboards from other brands" may as well have not said it at all, if that's all they're going to say.

Three of the first listed reviews on Google for the SN850 have reviewers testing on Ryzen 5000, Ryzen 3000 and EPYC 77xx. The first two on X570 and none of them are seeing the same phenomenon.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

But only a few people are having this issue, so that doesn't make sense.

That's why I smell BS and have asked @W1zzard to try the SN850 on X570 chipset lanes to see if the drive has the same write limitation that WD have apparently confirmed to Asrock.

I mean hey, if it gives you consolation on your ASRock purchase..."we tested some other motherboards from other brands" may as well have not said it at all, if that's all they're going to say.

Three of the first listed reviews on Google for the SN850 have reviewers testing on Ryzen 5000, Ryzen 3000 and EPYC 77xx. The first two on X570 and none of them are seeing the same phenomenon.

But they are not running over the chipset lanes.....

 

[Hachi_Roku256563]

So its a bios bug
i was right
the drive was fine but you got extra storage anyway
sooo everyone wins
STILL cant belive 3000mb/s writes is BAD

 

[tabascosauz]

That's why I smell BS and have asked @W1zzard to try the SN850 on X570 chipset lanes to see if the drive has the same write limitation that WD have apparently confirmed to Asrock.


But they are not running over the chipset lanes.....

From ASRock's email it doesn't even sound like they're implying it's a chipset issue. Limitation of what? Their response reads like a textbook workshop on how to write in non-committal language...

Somehow there's this bug that only the SN850 can have this issue and only when it's connected over chipset lanes, that work just fine with other 4.0 drives over the PCH? That doesn't make any sense - sure, if an overloaded X570 PCH due to Titan Ridge is the problem, but why would it only affect the SN850??

Does WD offer firmware updates through their SSD Dashboard? I haven't gone back in a while since hi DPI broke the program

 

[monkeyboy46800]

From ASRock's email it doesn't even sound like they're implying it's a chipset issue. Limitation of what? Their response reads like a textbook workshop on how to write in non-committal language...

Somehow there's this bug that only the SN850 can have this issue and only when it's connected over chipset lanes, that work just fine with other 4.0 drives over the PCH? That doesn't make any sense - sure, if an overloaded X570 PCH due to Titan Ridge is the problem, but why would it only affect the SN850??

Does WD offer firmware updates through their SSD Dashboard? I haven't gone back in a while since hi DPI broke the program

I have a ticket ongoing with WD, shot them of a multitude of logs yesterday, I'm in touch with one of their L3 engineers, found him on linkedin and he gladly took on board my case, there gonna do some tests in their lab

I could imagine if the thunderbolt was eating a lot of the bandwidth that could be a potential cause but I have same results with Thunderbolt Chip disabled in the bios and why are read speeds just fine, in fact I have tested with everything on the chipset disabled even USB (used remote desktop to log in) still hitting that 3GB/s wall on writes.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I have a ticket ongoing with WD, shot them of a multitude of logs yesterday, I'm in touch with one of their L3 engineers, found him on linkedin and he gladly took on board my case, there gonna do some tests in their lab

I could imagine if the thunderbolt was eating a lot of the bandwidth that could be a potential cause but I have same results with Thunderbolt Chip disabled in the bios and why are read speeds just fine, in fact I have tested with everything on the chipset disabled even USB (used remote desktop to log in) still hitting that 3GB/s wall on writes.

Again, I told you I had the same kind of issue, read speeds were fine, write speeds were, well half of what they should be. If you do some searching, you'll see that other people have/had similar issues, where the write speeds aren't living up to expectations. I did not update the firmware on my drive to fix this for sure.
As for the actual solution, I can't find one, but it doesn't just affect your combination of hardware.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Again, I told you I had the same kind of issue, read speeds were fine, write speeds were, well half of what they should be. If you do some searching, you'll see that other people have/had similar issues, where the write speeds aren't living up to expectations. I did not update the firmware on my drive to fix this for sure.
As for the actual solution, I can't find one, but it doesn't just affect your combination of hardware.

You keep mentioning other people with same issue, but I don't see other people when google searching with same issue. I do see people having issue with TCL Cache not working correctly after a few days or a heavy session of writes, and speeds drop to 1GB/s but I dont have this type of problem, I am hitting a wall of 3GB/s writes which shows TLS cache is working fine, but not working at full capacity bandwidth.

 

[TheLostSwede]

You keep mentioning other people with same issue, but I don't see other people when google searching with same issue. I do see people having issue with TCL Cache not working correctly after a few days or a heavy session of writes, and speeds drop to 1GB/s but I dont have this type of problem, I am hitting a wall of 3GB/s writes which shows TLS cache is working fine, but not working at full capacity bandwidth.

You mean like this thread here on TPU?

Phison e12 Slow write speed, not using SLC cache

I have a Microcenter/Inland branded 1tb Phison e12 based SSD, which normally should get around 2000-3000 mb/s writes, but mine is only getting around 1000 mb/s. I did some research and it looks like this speed is the drives write speed without SLC cache, so it looks like my cache is full and can...

www.techpowerup.com

Or this on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/czg84a
or this
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/crnk5w
or this on Anandtech

Question - nvme very slow write speed

I have a 3900x with a x570 mobo and 1TB sabrent rocket nvme m2 PCIe 4.0 disk. My write benchmarks are very very poor. Chipset and windows drivers are upto date. what gives ? how can i troubleshoot? https://ibb.co/SKFN03h https://ibb.co/JmDJZWG

forums.anandtech.com

It's really not hard to find people with similar issues.
And no, they don't have the same hardware as you, but are clearly seeing the same or a very similar issue.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

And no, they don't have the same hardware as you, but are clearly seeing the same or a very similar issue.

That's the key point, similar issue but not the same

 

[TheLostSwede]

That's the key point, similar issue but not the same

Close enough. They're all experiencing slow write speeds on PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives. How precise so you want it to be?

Did you try this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/crnk5w/_/f4yi5pj
Here you go, someone with EXACTLY the same problem as you. Except I guess that's you.

Western Digital SN850 1/2TB Extremely slow write and kinda slow read

Dear Forum Members, I have an issue with Western Digital SN850 Gen4 NVME. I cannot seem to get over 6.3 GB/s read and 3.2 GB/s write My setup is Asrock X570 ITX/TB3 and 5950x with 64GB Ram All reviews for my motherboard show that there should be no issue getting over 4 GB/s writes All reviews...

www.win-raid.com

I guess this ain't you though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabytegaming/comments/km2flk
I mean, we are really trying to figure out what is going on here, but you just keep shooting people down. So tell, me, why should we bother trying any more?
You seem to know best, so good luck.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Close enough. They're all experiencing slow write speeds on PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives. How precise so you want it to be?

Did you try this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/crnk5w/_/f4yi5pj
Here you go, someone with EXACTLY the same problem as you. Except I guess that's you.

Western Digital SN850 1/2TB Extremely slow write and kinda slow read

Dear Forum Members, I have an issue with Western Digital SN850 Gen4 NVME. I cannot seem to get over 6.3 GB/s read and 3.2 GB/s write My setup is Asrock X570 ITX/TB3 and 5950x with 64GB Ram All reviews for my motherboard show that there should be no issue getting over 4 GB/s writes All reviews...

www.win-raid.com

I guess this ain't you though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabytegaming/comments/km2flk
I mean, we are really trying to figure out what is going on here, but you just keep shooting people down. So tell, me, why should we bother trying any more?
You seem to know best, so good luck.

I'm not shooting you down, I just don't believe this is an issue with configuration.
Something is bugging on this drive when running across the chipset lanes...

Another example of NVME GEN4 running across the X570 chipset , no issues here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/emc2bv

 

[TheLostSwede]

I'm not shooting you down, I just don't believe this is an issue with configuration.
Something is bugging on this drive when running across the chipset lanes...

Another example of NVME GEN4 running across the X570 chipset , no issues here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/emc2bv
View attachment 189938

You clearly didn't even look at the links I provided then.
Also, how can it be "this drive" when you just got a new drive?
I really don't get you, you are looking for an answer that doesn't exist.
The issue is not the WD drive.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Also, how can it be "this drive" when you just got a new drive?

ON SN850 1 & 2 TB model.....

You clearly didn't even look at the links I provided then.

Only the last link that you posted in your edit is exactly what I am experiencing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabytegaming/comments/km2flk

 

[TheLostSwede]

ON SN850 1 & 2 TB model.....


Only the last link that you posted in your edit is exactly what I am experiencing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabytegaming/comments/km2flk

So I was right in presuming the other link was you posting in a different forum under a different nick then?

Regardless, the problem is still not because of the drive.