AMD motherboards are causing massive slowdowns for PCIe 5.0 SSDs

If you’re running a PCIe Gen 5 solid-state drive, odds are pretty good that you care a lot about speed. After all, you paid a big premium to get one of the fastest SSDs available right now, and probably a good bit extra for a motherboard that could take advantage of it.

But some PC owners with AMD X670E motherboards say they’re seeing abysmal read and write speeds with those fancy Gen 5 drives.

According to forum posts by owners of MSI and Asus motherboards using the X670E chipset (that’s the newest model compatible with AM5-socket Ryzen processors), at least some of these mobos are chopping Gen 5 drives all the way down to PCIe Gen 1 speeds.

In other words, a drive that should be reading at 10GB/s or faster is being hobbled down to just 1GB/s on an x4 lane. While the advantages of Gen 5 drives are a bit overblown, getting speeds that would embarrass even a storage drive from 10 years ago is obviously cause for concern.

According to WCCFTech, a now-removed response from a Crucial representative (the manufacturer of one of the T705 drives affected) pointed the finger at the “first” M.2 slot on the motherboard, which often shares PCIe lanes with the first PCIe expansion slot, where most users put their graphics card. Moving the drive to another slot might solve the issue… but might also mean having to settle for Gen 4 SSD speeds.

A few users have said that the latest motherboard BIOS update from MSI fixed the problem, but others haven’t been so lucky.

If your recently upgraded AMD-based desktop is giving you guff or hanging on boot, maybe try moving the drive elsewhere. And make sure you have a solid backup, too.