According to Crucial, the brand is facing an increase in requests for after-sales returns of these products. The reason behind this could be linked to a bug in the operation of the M.2s connected to the CPU capable of managing PCIe 5.0 on X670E motherboards.
X670E: pay attention to the throughput of your M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD!
After a bit of digging into the problem, it turns out that Crucial SSDs are not to blame for this problem of blown throughput. In fact, the problem lies with the motherboard, and more specifically with the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot connected to the CPU.
Via TechpowerUp, we learn that the cause of the problem is linked to PCIe ‘s active power management (ASPM), which reduces the speed of the interface where the SSD is connected in order to reduce power consumption. If this management “tends to be disabled, a problem in the firmware may engage it in a buggy way”, we learn.
Obviously, this doesn’t help us, as it literally breaks the interface throughputs to the point of falling to PCIe 1.0 levels. Behind all this, apart from the actual loss of throughput, some people are complaining that they can’t boot.
One way around this problem is to mount your PCIe 5.0 SSD on a PCIe 4.0 M.2 interface slot. Admittedly, this isn’t optimal for the latest-generation storage media, but it’s better than nothing. As for motherboard manufacturers, we’ll have to wait for a corrective BIOS, which seems to be already available from MSI. However, this problem is specific to the X670E chipset; X670 and B650/E cards are not affected.