WD Black SN850 and X570 chipset
Among the best SSDs that can be found currently on the market, there is certainly the Western Digital Black SN850: the 3D NAND memory, the PCIe 4.0 technology and the reading speed that manages to touch peaks of 7,000 MB / s are definitely tempting. thousands of users looking for a performing solution that reflects the general components purchased when you decide to assemble a PC.Yet there seems to be some sort of incompatibility between this SSD and AMD's X570 chipset: some users have indeed reported a drop in performance even higher than 40%, attributed precisely to the fact that the M.2 slot on the motherboard is connected to the chipset in question and does not communicate directly with the processor.
Obviously Western Digital has promptly identified the problem, explaining, through an official statement, that this SSD can be subject to significant performance drops when connected to the M.2 slot on certain motherboards. Specifically, this occurs when the MPS (Max Payload Size) is set to 128 bytes. The company has however stated that it is already working to release a firmware update that aims to fix this issue, whose release date is around July 12.
Waiting for Western Digital to make this available update, users are advised to install the SSD in an M.2 slot connected directly to the Ryzen processor, without having to switch from the X570 chipset. It is also strongly recommended that the latest versions of the BIOS and all system drivers be installed. Once you can install the update, just download it by simply opening the Western Digital Dashboard software, which should show a notification regarding the new update.
If you want to buy the WD Black SN850, you can find it currently available on Amazon at a great price!
Connecting the WD Black SN850 to an X570 chipset kills the SSD's performance
In brief: The combination of Western Digital's Black SN850 SSD and an X570 chipset may sound appealing, but be careful how you set it up. A report has highlighted a problem in which the SSD's write speeds are heavily impacted when it's used in an M.2 slot connected to the X570 chipset.
The report comes from German site ComputerBase, which investigated complaints from forum users about the SN850 underperforming by testing the SSD.
The problem stems from not all M.2 ports on a motherboard communicating directly with the processor due to the limited number of PCIe lanes on the CPU, leaving some slots connected to the chipset instead. Motherboard manufacturers have confirmed that going through the chipsets can result in higher latencies due to the longer line paths, but the performance difference tends to be less than 10%.
The Call of Duty-themed WD SN850 SSD
Testing the SN850 SSD on a Gigabyte Aorus X570 Master using the board’s third M.2 slot, which is connected to the chipset, the publication discovered performance almost halved. CrystalDiskMark found the 1TB SSD managed a sequential write speed of just over 3,200 MB/s, whereas placing the drive in the first, CPU-connected M.2 slot pushed it to over 5,200 MB/s, near the manufacturer’s claimed max speed of 5,300 MB/s. The disparity was even greater in other tests, reaching 43.4%.
ComputerBase tested other PCIe 4.0 SSDs and found while there was a performance difference between the CPU-connected and chipset-connected slots, it was less than ten percent, and there was no loss of write speeds with PCIe 3.0 SSDs.
Western Digital said it is investigating the issue and the causes. As noted by Tom’s Hardware, it’s suspected that the problem may be the X570 chipset detecting the SN850 SSD as Gen 3.0, as many PCIe 3.0 SSDs have speeds of 3,200 MB/s.