The Gen4 SSD performs worse than your SATA SSD.
The Gen4 SSD performs worse than your SATA SSD.
Hello. Your Micron 3400 SSD and Crucial MX500 are both new additions. The Micron came with the 11th gen Predator Helios laptop, and you've been using it for about two years. In CrystalDIskMark, the Micron is showing noticeably slower performance compared to your MX500. I understand SSDs can degrade over time due to frequent read/write operations, but how significant is this effect after just two years? Micron 3400 MX500
These rates aren't achievable with a SATA storage device. It seems you likely have a memory buffer in place.
Micron 3400 is the original version of Crucial P5 Plus, as reviewed here: The drive is 78% full, leaving only 22% available. In the review, the 2 TB model had 200 GB of SLC write cache, meaning the 1 TB version would have about 100 GB, and the 500 GB model around 50 GB. However, SLC write cache requires sufficient disk space—TLC uses 3 bits per cell, so roughly 150 GB free is needed for 50 GB cache. You currently have 104 GB free, which likely means less than 30-40 GB of cache, possibly partially used by recent installations. Write speed is modest but not unplayable, especially if TRIM (defragmentation) runs to help. The SATA drive also caches data in RAM, affecting overall performance. This test is essentially stressing the RAM.
I can verify you're using a momentum cache. My MX500 SSD from Crucial typically shows around 500 reads and 300 writes on Crystal DiskMark when enabled. Performance has improved significantly—reads reached 10,594 and writes 9,487. This feature is new to me, and my drive is now much faster than before. LMAO!
These performance numbers don't match what a SATA drive can achieve. The SATA standard reaches about 600 MB/s at most. The 8380 MB/s you're seeing suggests something else is at play. Your write cache is active, which helps speed things up for sequential reads and writes to RAM. You'll see two key points: first, disabling the cache would cause a significant drop in performance around 500-550 MB/s, and second, when using the cache, your RAM usage will increase noticeably. Your Micron drives are much faster, and pairing them with RAM would likely boost speeds further, unless there are other limiting factors.
This momentum cache feature really boosted my SSD speed compared to NVMe, giving it a serious performance upgrade. For a more practical approach, I recommend using it only on systems with over 8GB of RAM, as it consumes about 25% of the available memory, which might affect overall performance.