WD SN850 Slower than expected performance

[las]

Don't compare to reviewers using it as 2nd non-OS drive especially not if its emphy, numbers will always be better, it looks fine to me, i have 970 Evo, 970 Evo Plus, SN750 and SN850 + 980 Pro and the SN850 is the fastest of them all altho 980 Pro is close and wins some tests but overall SN850 is faster and often cheaper too

 

[dominicc]

In my opinion, WD SN850 is okay in platform compatibility.

Except that with BIOSs < 1.44 of the ASRock X570 Taichi Razer Edition the system doesn't POST with 1 or more SN850 installed in any slot - reported to ASRock here: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=18733&PID=86769&#86769

Confirmed that the Beta BIOS 1.44 'fixed' it, but the ASRock tech support said they didn't change anything related to NVME between 1.40 (non-working) and 1.44 (working)...

ASRock support quote: "BIOS L1.44 mainly update the AMD AGESA Code to 1.2.0.2, we didn’t adjust any M.2 functions"

The drive still isn't listed on their Storage QVL for *any* of their X570 motherboards.

Firmware on my SN850's was 611100WD at the time of installation.

 

[Bewwm]

I recently bought the WD SN850, My motherboard which is the MSI B450 Tomahawk max, which only has one M.2 Slot and this is the results I'm getting well below what i expected, is it the motherboard or something else?

 

[TheLostSwede]

I recently bought the WD SN850, My motherboard which is the MSI B450 Tomahawk max, which only has one M.2 Slot and this is the results I'm getting well below what i expected, is it the motherboard or something else?
View attachment 200204

You only have PCIe 3.0 on that board, not PCIe 4.0, so those numbers are quite good for PCIe 3.0.

 

[Bewwm]

You only have PCIe 3.0 on that board, not PCIe 4.0, so those numbers are quite good for PCIe

Thought it might've been the board, just had to double check thank you boss, cant complain too much still better than regular SSD

 

[iBruceypoo]

I recently bought the WD SN850, My motherboard which is the MSI B450 Tomahawk max, which only has one M.2 Slot and this is the results I'm getting well below what i expected, is it the motherboard or something else?
View attachment 200204

Hmmm, wonder what the issue is?

Just grabbed a new SN850 500GB myself and here's the CrystalDiskMark 1st run today.

My board has (3) M.2 slots, only one is PCIe 4.0. I know in some bios you sometimes need to activate (enable) various M.2 slots.

Hope you find out what's going on... Good Luck Mate!

 

[Caring1]

Just grabbed a new SN850 500GB myself and here's the CrystalDiskMark 1st run today.

View attachment 200856

Nanya chips are not known for their speed, makes me wonder how much better it could have been.

 

[tallarnk]

Hello! You'll have to forgive me I'm just an average user, but I've been interested in the on going discussion regarding these drives. I recently purchased an Aorus X570 master rev 1.2 MB specifically for the option of having 3 m.2 slots on the board. Great! I thought. However after noticing stuttering issues with a capture card I have and narrowing the issue down to the onboard WIFI adaptor causing the problem I thought there is perhaps the same thing causing an issue with the drive speed as i've got pretty similar results. the Issue causing the capture card to have reduced bandwidth is that the WIFI adaptor seems to be limiting the max payload on everytthing that uses the same bus ? (sorry this might be incorrect way of putting it) to 128 bytes. I've emailed Gigabyte to see what can be done because there isn't an option in the BIOS to disabled the adaptor and I can't remove it without taking off the plastic shroud thingy. So although I've read what the MB vendor in the other person(s) instance(s) and WD had to say I wonder is this is the case with my board at least, but also it might be something to check on your own board. I used a program called HWiNFO64. I'm sure all you tech experts have heard of it. Do you think this is a possible cause of the drive speed limitation ?

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Hello! You'll have to forgive me I'm just an average user, but I've been interested in the on going discussion regarding these drives. I recently purchased an Aorus X570 master rev 1.2 MB specifically for the option of having 3 m.2 slots on the board. Great! I thought. However after noticing stuttering issues with a capture card I have and narrowing the issue down to the onboard WIFI adaptor causing the problem I thought there is perhaps the same thing causing an issue with the drive speed as i've got pretty similar results. the Issue causing the capture card to have reduced bandwidth is that the WIFI adaptor seems to be limiting the max payload on everytthing that uses the same bus ? (sorry this might be incorrect way of putting it) to 128 bytes. I've emailed Gigabyte to see what can be done because there isn't an option in the BIOS to disabled the adaptor and I can't remove it without taking off the plastic shroud thingy. So although I've read what the MB vendor in the other person(s) instance(s) and WD had to say I wonder is this is the case with my board at least, but also it might be something to check on your own board. I used a program called HWiNFO64. I'm sure all you tech experts have heard of it. Do you think this is a possible cause of the drive speed limitation ?

Just pulled out my intel wifi card, still getting crappy writes:

I do still see limitation to 128bit though on the chipset lanes dur to titan ridge thunderbolt controller:

Disabling Thunderbolt controller and I now get 256bit bus and SN85O writes have increased by 2gb/s to 5129 MB/s , so it seems SN850 needs that 256 bus or more to get max write speeds.

Well done @tallarnk for finding the root cause

 

[tallarnk]

oh that's brilliant, I'm so glad! I'm also bloody annoyed, how is the average user supposed to know that on purchase..oh btw some of your stuff won't work correctly. the only things that are mentioned clearly in the manual are the 2 end sata ports.

 

[RUSTA]

For reference

Ryzen 5 3600 Gigabyte B550M Aorus pro-p
1TB SN850 on 1st m.2 slot connected to CPU.

RND 4K Q32T16 reads are lower than others by a fair bit (~700MB/s). Format to 4KB block size fix this?

 

[Deluxe1]

I've got 2 1TB 850's, one in the motherboard slot and the other in a Silverstone ECM23 in the pcie slot.

Asus X570 VIII Hero, the 4k scores seem a lot lower than some I have seen.

 

[Sihastru]

I'm seeing the same, also IOPS are halved now for 4K Q32T16. Must be the result of new AGESA code or perhaps something Microsoft f-ed up with an update. The drive has the same FW version since forever ago.

 

[basco]

There is some talk about slowing down sequential write rate on amd x570 on computerbase in german.
It should only effect you when the ssd is tied over the chipset with pcie 4.0.
There should be no probs if its directly tied over the cpu.
Motherboard manufacturers say it can be the higher latency over the chipset but should not effect that hard.
Western digital is looking into it.

that´s just my short summary.

sorry did not see the update:
WD says there should be a Firmware update on July 12.
and confirms there can be a slower write performance over the M2-chipset slot on some motherboards and especially when MPS is dialed in at 128byte.

WD Black SN850: Einbruch der Schreibrate über Chipsatz-Slot wird untersucht

Die WD Black SN850 SSD verliert im M.2-Slot am X570-Chipsatz unverhältnismäßig viel Leistung. Die Suche nach der Ursache läuft.

www.computerbase.de

 

[tallarnk]

There is some talk about slowing down sequential write rate on amd x570 on computerbase in german.
It should only effect you when the ssd is tied over the chipset with pcie 4.0.
There should be no probs if its directly tied over the cpu.
Motherboard manufacturers say it can be the higher latency over the chipset but should not effect that hard.
Western digital is looking into it.

that´s just my short summary.

sorry did not see the update:
WD says there should be a Firmware update on July 12.
and confirms there can be a slower write performance over the M2-chipset slot on some motherboards and especially when MPS is dialed in at 128byte.

WD Black SN850: Einbruch der Schreibrate über Chipsatz-Slot wird untersucht

Die WD Black SN850 SSD verliert im M.2-Slot am X570-Chipsatz unverhältnismäßig viel Leistung. Die Suche nach der Ursache läuft.

www.computerbase.de

Yeah, this is ridiculous. noone is telling anyone about this until they find out themselves. Suppliers aren't being told by board manufacturers, etc. I'm trying to talk to Gigabyte about this and they are so far bloody useless. I've told them clearly what the problem is and they keep focusing on my capture card saying to move it to another slot (the ccapture card was how I found out about the issue in the first place). I'm quite annoyed because i want to return my board, the supplier are happy for me to return it but i need to know which X570 board that has 3 NVME slots won't have the same issue with the 2nd and 3rd slot. so far no success!

Edit : read the article...Great news!! thanks for that!

 

[Deluxe1]

WD Preps New Firmware to Restore WD Black SN850's Performance On AMD X570 Chipset

Back in black

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Sihastru]

Yeah, I'm on B550 with the drive on CPU lanes. So it's not related to that.

 

[SomeOne99h]

TechPowerUp is posting it now:

Western Digital Readies WD Black SN850 Firmware Update Restoring AMD X570 Performance

Western Digital is reportedly preparing a firmware update for its WD Black SN850 M.2 NVMe SSD that restores the drive's write performance levels on PCs based on the AMD X570 platform. This problem is localized to X570, specifically to when the drive is installed on an M.2 NVMe slot that is wired...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[monkeyboy46800]

New firmware is out for SN850 v613200WD and issue is fixed
No more slow writes on 128 byte pcie bus.
Only took 7 months !!

 

[Deluxe1]

Just updated and I thought my 4k scores would of got better but no?

 

[tallarnk]

Thankful for the firmware update, can confirm it's sorted out the write speed, but the read speed still isn't hitting the 7k mark.I managed to increase it by getting a custom bios from Gigabyte that gave me the option to disable the onboard wifi so the max payload speed increased to 256 bytes. but the firmware update doesn't seem to have done anything to resolve that side of things. I will contact Western Digital and see if they can help. However the firmware works it doesn't seem to affect or be related to the payload speed...at least on the write side of things because my current is 256 and the max is of course 512 for the drive.

 

[monkeyboy46800]

Don't think we will see 7Gbps over the chipset, but would be nice

 

[tallarnk]

well the info for the firmware release says it fixes the write performance..and it has, it's running at performance specs, bypassing the now 256 byte max payload speed restriction so i'd like to know what's the situation with the read speed performance as well, unless that is something that cannot be sorted without the restriction on the max payload speed being removed.

 

[legendos]

New firmware is out for SN850 v613200WD and issue is fixed
No more slow writes on 128 byte pcie bus.
Only took 7 months !!

Can someone upload the firmware 613200WD for the SN850?

Cause the WD Dashboard program still shows me the old fw as the actual version.

Best regards!

 

[tallarnk]

I'm still in the middle of getting suppport from WD. I'm not a super techy so i'm not sure how the write speed can match the advertised performance, it's actually a llittle bit higher but the read speed is about 450 MB/s less.