Any thoughts on why my new SSD is cycling speed while writing?

[DigiFilm]

In an effort to speed up my uploads and processing, I bought a 2T M.2 NVMe SSD. Blistering fast under ideal conditions, up to 5500MBs on a Gen 4 Motherboard. I'm pretty sure my motherboard is Gen 3, so the SSD would be limited to 3500MBs. Ok, no big deal.

The plan was to move all of my photo and video files to the drive, along with my processing software to take the strain off of my 1T hard drive.

I installed it yesterday evening and got it initialized with no problem. After getting it set up, I started moving photos to the new drive from an external backup SSD I keep connected via USB. The first folder was large, over 0.5T of subfolders and files. The transfer rate was around 450MBs, I am assuming the speed was throttled by the 3.0 USB port the backup is on. The problem started after the first large folder and I began to move others. The drive slowed to around 300-350MBs, and would transfer for about 15-20 seconds then come to a stop. After a short wait it would resume, then go through the same cycle again, 300MBs to nothing.

I checked task manager and found the MS search indexer and MS Edge were taking up almost 1G of resources, so I ended those tasks. There was no improvement. I can't see anything else running in the background that would be using enough resources to affect the transfer of files.

The only thing I can figure at this point is heat. I shut the computer down before going to bed to let it cool thoroughly and will try to move more today.

Any other thoughts? What else could be slowing down the drive?

 

[Overread]

Most likely its buffers on the computer getting full and throttling the speed. Just the same as when you are writing photos to your card on the camera when taking photos, it will buffer only so much data before it hits the limit and then it all slows down.

So basically when transferring massive amounts of data you hit the buffering limit and that then throttles the transfer rate.

In general its not an issue in your situation because this is a once off massive movement of data that you won't be regularly repeating. So hitting the buffer limit is fine, it takes a tiny bit longer ,but in the end transfers over fast enough that its done.

 

[DigiFilm]

Most likely its buffers on the computer getting full and throttling the speed. Just the same as when you are writing photos to your card on the camera when taking photos, it will buffer only so much data before it hits the limit and then it all slows down.

So basically when transferring massive amounts of data you hit the buffering limit and that then throttles the transfer rate.

In general its not an issue in your situation because this is a once off massive movement of data that you won't be regularly repeating. So hitting the buffer limit is fine, it takes a tiny bit longer ,but in the end transfers over fast enough that its done.

Thanks for your response. I would agree with that 100%, but if not for one thing:

The transfer of the large folder (0.5T +/-) was completely unencumbered for the entire transfer and took about 15-20 minutes. It wasn't until that was done and I started the next folder, which was much smaller, that it started doing the speed thing.

I'm no computer guy, I'm lucky I got the drive initialized without frying something, so this is an honest question: Wouldn't the buffer have emptied itself once the first transfer was completed?

 

[Overread]

I don't know specifics, but I would assume that part of the buffer from that first move might have been preserved in the computer in some form and then not fully dumped after the transfer was done.

 

[DigiFilm]

I tried to transfer the videos when I got home, same thing.

From USB external SSD to USB portable, 300MBs, steady
From USB external SSD to hard drive, average 50MBs
From USB external SSD to internal SSD:

The above varies between 360MBS and 0.

I then tried uploading from a card to the SSD, same thing.

I again stopped a couple of background apps that were using resources, no help.

So, thinking about your suggestion, I went into the hard drive and created a cache of 36000MB to 72000MB on top of the 24G of DRAM installed.

No help.

Very frustrated!

 

[DigiFilm]

Sent a CS request off to Crucial. I'm guessing they've seen this before. I'm sure it's the computer, just don't know where to look.