Unacceptably Slow NVMe PCIe 4.0 Drive (3 Faulty Units?)

Update

Thanks to Youtuber Артём Ревич we discovered that the write cache is disabled. This setting, surprisingly, affected all three of my Netac drives across two computers and even an external enclosure. It appears Netac might be shipping these drives with Write Cache disabled by default (unlike other brands I've used). It could be a potential bug or a manufacturing issue causing this setting to be shipped with it switched off.

The good news is enabling Write Cache resulted in a dramatic performance boost, jumping from agonizingly slow 5 Mbps write speeds to 6,000 Mbps on crystal disk mark! Thanks to the YouTube community for sorting this out, I've had this issue for a month now and Netac support has been useless blaming me but Артём Ревич stepped in and pointed me in the right direction. Netac should not be shipping these drives with the write cache disabled and I am not sure why I ended up with three drives that all had it disabled by default.

Netac support has been useless I won't bother explaining it to them but if there is anyone else who bought these drives I also have this same issue, go into the device manager and turn on the Write Cache.

Introduction 

The question I keep asking myself is, did Netac send me 3 faulty NVMe drives, or is something else causing this extremely slow performance across all three Netac drives? I installed them on two different PCs,  a USB 4.0 40Gbps NVMe enclosure as well as a 10Gbps NVMe enclosure, and the results are consistently disappointing.

Purchase and Authenticity

All 3 of these drives were purchased from the Netac Official Store on Aliexpress with choice delivery, which adds to their legitimacy. They were bought back in November 2023, but I didn't install and test them until March 28th, 2023. Unfortunately, this means I'm beyond the Aliexpress 90-day return/refund policy.  I've contacted both Aliexpress and Netac after installing and experiencing these frustratingly slow speeds. An Aliexpress chat operative verified the drives as genuine but suggested they might be faulty. I'm awaiting updates and hoping for a resolution.

First Look and Heatsink Compatibility

Many laptops, motherboards, USB enclosures, and Mini PCs come equipped with their own NVMe heatsink solutions. This poses a major compatibility issue with the Netac drive, as its pre-installed heatsink is bulky and might not fit within the limited space of these systems. Worse yet, the only way to utilize your device's existing cooling is to remove the Netac heatsink – an act that immediately voids your warranty due to a tamper-evident sticker placed over one of the screws. This dilemma caused me significant hesitation in installing these drives sooner, as I was reluctant to void the warranty to install them on my MSI and ASUS motherboards so I set them aside until now.

As my main Kingston Drive was filling up, I decided I needed the extra 4TB of space and went ahead and finally installed the Netac drive. I went ahead and removed the heatsink from the 4TB drive to properly install it onto my motherboard.

This drive can be fitted into a PS5 without removing/replacing the included heatsink and the other two, 2TB drives that I purchased still have their included heatsink fitted as this was never removed, even during testing. 

Test Methodology

• I ran a read-and-write test using Crystal Disk Mark 8.0.4 on the default preset. 

• I also ran a Black Magic Disk Speed Test to assess real-world performance when reading and writing video files for media usage.

• I also tested a manual file transfer of a 7 GB 4k ProRess 422 File.

My reference Drive

As a reference point, I will be comparing this data to my 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade NVME PCIE 4.0 drive. This drive is installed into the 1st M2 slot on my motherboard and performs well, as expected. 

Testing

I tested this drive in 4 different setups as I was determined to isolate any potential variables and understand these strange performance issues. All three drives have shown incredibly slow write performance in real-world usage and I have never come across anything like this before.

MSI Motar B650 Motherboard - My First Encounter

I installed the Netac 4TB NVMe drive directly into a high-end Ryzen 9 7950X3D system, expecting fast performance. Instead, I encountered performance inconsistency so severe that it renders the drive practically unusable.

CrystalDiskMark: The First Red Flag

While CrystalDiskMark's initial sequential speeds looked promising (6495Mbps read / 5125Mbps write), the SEQ1MQ1T1 benchmark exposed a fatal flaw: decent reads at 2975Mbps but a catastrophic 3.56Mbps write speed. 

For reference, my Kingston NVME drive has a write speed of 3867Mbps in this same exact SEQ1MQ1T1 benchmark.

Black Magic Disk Speed Test: Further Confirmation

The Netac drives mostly failed the Black Magic “Will it Work” tests with the 4K video formats (4K H.265 at 63MBps, 4K ProRes 422 HQ at 4Mbps). Meanwhile, The Kingston NVME drive effortlessly handled these tasks at  2606Mbps and 1658Mbps respectively.

Real-World Pain: Abysmal File Transfers

This isn't just theoretical. Transferring even a small 4K video file from my main drive onto this was agonizing, crawling at a mere 4-5MBps.  

Ryzen 7840HS Mini Pc - Another Drive, Another Disappointment

I thought maybe it was my other computer, a bad Windows install or perhaps the 4TB drive was faulty so I took a new 2TB Netac NV7000 drive and installed it into a PCIe Gen 4 slot on my Mini PC. I then went ahead with a painfully slow fresh installation of Windows 11, which was an ominous sign – write speeds were compromised. After an agonizing 45 minutes, Windows 11 was finally running, but the drive's sluggish, unresponsive behaviour persisted

CrystalDiskMark: A different drive but similar results

Crystal Disk Mark painted a depressingly familiar picture: a shameful 6Mbps write speed on SEQ1MQ1T1. This puts the 2TB drive over 600 times slower than my Kingston reference, confirming a disastrous pattern.

Black Magic Disk Speed Test: Further Confirmation

The Black Magic Disk Speed Test reiterated the Netac NVMe drives agonising performance. Results were mostly failed, mirroring the issues I faced with the 4TB drive on a completely different system. It's baffling how a drive can struggle with 4K video file transfers at a mere 4-5Mbps.

Real-World Pain: Abysmal File Transfers

As before, this isn't some abstract benchmark issue. Transferring even small 4K video files was an exercise in frustration. The Netac choked, managing only 4-5Mbps transfers while inexplicably heating up in the process.

Unexpected Twist - does it perform better with an NVME Enclosure?

For testing, I decided not to remove the included heatsink as I did not want to void the warranty for these 2TB drives after the appalling wrote speeds I was getting.

Intriguingly, testing these drives in a 10Gbps enclosure from Lexar (Review for that available here) yielded a bizarre result: a massive write performance boost at the expense of significantly slower reads, likely due to a bandwidth bottleneck. This surprising outcome left me more perplexed than ever.

At this point, I decided to test out the 2TB version that I had in an NVME 40gbps USB 4 Enclosure from JEYI.

USB 4 40gbps NVME Enclosure

40GBps USB 4.0 Port

• CrystalDiskMark (SEQ1MQ1T1):

• Black Magic Disk Speed Test: Average Write speed of 26Mbps

• Real-World Impact: Painfully slow media file transfers

20GBps USB Port

• CrystalDiskMark (SEQ1MQ1T1):

• Black Magic Disk Speed Test: Average Write speed of 1826MBps

5GBps USB Port

• CrystalDiskMark (SEQ1MQ1T1):

• Black Magic Disk Speed Test: Average Write speed of 436Mbps

The Netac drive exhibits better write speeds when connected to slower ports within the enclosure. This highlights a potential fundamental issue with the drive itself, rather than simply a bottleneck problem.

Running on GEN 4, GEN 3 & GEN 2

Driven by the earlier findings, I decided to revisit both my motherboard's internal NVMe slot. I modified the PCIe GEN settings on the BIOS running it a GEN 4 speed, GEN 3 speed and finally GEN 2 speeds. The results from these tests only deepened the mystery.

The results here confirmed the earlier hypotheses, running the drives at a slower NVME PCIe bandwidth does indeed boost its real word write performance and by a BIG margin. I have already said enough here during my earlier testings with the enclosures but these tests here confirm the earlier findings.

Installing into a PS5

I performed a quick installation and benchmark test of the 2TB drive on my PS5. While the console recognized and accepted the drive, the reported read speed was a mere 4001 Mbps (confirmed with a second test). This is significantly lower than the expected 6000-7000MBps range reported by other users who have tested this Netac NVMe drive and leads me to suspect the write performance may also be as abysmal as my earlier tests. 

The PS5 does not provide write speed indications for upgraded SSDs, but the disappointing read speeds alone raise serious concerns. This further highlights the perplexing behaviour of all three of these drives.

Conclusion

The inconsistent and strange performance of all three Netac drives remains a baffling mystery. Their agonizingly slow write speeds in real-world use—even slower than many SD cards and USB drives—render them unusable for most tasks, including video editing, file transfers, and gaming.

I still can’t understand why reducing the available bandwidth seems to inexplicably boost the write speeds. This bizarre behaviour raises serious questions:

• Did I truly receive three faulty drives?

• Is there a critical factor I've overlooked that could explain this?

• Will Netac or Aliexpress provide a resolution, or am I left with these useless drives?

I'll be contacting Netac for answers and will update this review if any new information arises.

At this point, I decided to test out the 2TB version that I had in this NVME 40gbps Enclosure from JEYI (Review for that available here) and this was when I started to notice something very bizarre.