
So I recently found a deal on a Western Digital Black NVMe PCIe Gen3. I was excited to see what this card could do as the current NVMe I have is a Plextor and while it’s been an amazing drive – newer is always better right?
Well, I’m sad to report. The WD NVMe is a poor performer. Below are screenshots from both Windows and Fedora 28 speed tests. I tried the card in both PCIe 3.0 and 2.0 slots. I set the bios to x4 x4 x4 x4. I tried every setting I could find to improve the performance but the write speeds never got better. The read speeds are ok but ultimately slower than the Plextor.
However, interestingly the Samsung NVMe from a friends machine also shows poor write speeds in comparison. Now these speeds are obviously better than most spinning drives and the read times are better than most SSD’s but I expected more.
It is interesting to see such a vast difference between Windows and Linux with NVMe. Perhaps it is Gnome benchmarks tool that is running different tests or perhaps isn’t geared towards NVMe drives. As stated the Plextor seems to run with expected results.
Troubleshooting Steps:
– Updated PCIe x4 x4 x4 x4
– Tried both 2.0 and 3.0 M.2 slots on MB
– Updated BIOS on motherboard MSI x470 Pro Carbon Gaming
– Added heat sinks to WD card to see if throttling was an issue
Samsung Speed Results:

Windows speed test PCIe 2.0

Fedora speed test PCIe 2.0
