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I have a HP ENVY Desktop - 795-0017na which I have upgraded with a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB drive, using a Silverstone ECM22 adapater to fit it into a PCIe x4 slot on the motherboard. The motherboard is a HP Berks (HP 844C).

The drive is performing at less than 1/3 of its stated performance - around 850MB/s rather than 3500MB/s.

When I use HWiNFO64 do inspect my system configuration, I see that it reports the drive having a Current Link Width of 1x on the PCI Express bus, when the Maximum Link Width is 4x.

I have a NVidia Geforce GTX 1660 plugged into the 16x slot, but nothing in the other PCIe slots. A factory-supplied SSD is in the main M.2 slot on the motherboard (reported as having a link width of x2).

I have tried disabling the other M.2 slot which contains a WiFi module which I don't use, but that didn't help.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

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    Its possible a physical x4 is an electrical x1. Worth checking the manual
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Mar 1, 2022 at 11:01
  • @JourneymanGeek Yes, I was thinking along the same lines but the manual says nothing about it. Knowing that it can take up to 2 drives I guess it can at least do x2 if both are in use.
    – ChanganAuto
    Mar 1, 2022 at 11:06
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    Have you tried reseating the drive in the adapter card?
    – Andrew Morton
    Mar 1, 2022 at 11:21
  • I've seen many motherboard manuals that state the second NVMe slot is shared with SATA ports (usually 3-6) and there may be an option in your BIOS to disable the additional SATA ports in order to increase the link width.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Mar 1, 2022 at 11:32
  • All I can see is that this system has very few PCIe lanes (20 for everything that is not the x16 card). Still, that should be enough. All the other manuals and specifications I found are extremely light on details.
    – Daniel B
    Mar 1, 2022 at 12:09

1 Answer 1

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The answer was to reseat everything (as suggested by Andrew Morton) - I took the adapter out of the PCIe socket, and the NVMe drive out of the adapter, then put everything back again.

Now I'm seeing read and write speeds inline with those advertised.

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    Those M.2 connectors have two positions: "seems OK," and "oh, that's how it's meant to go."
    – Andrew Morton
    Mar 1, 2022 at 17:29

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