Gen 2 250GB Expansion Card only getting ~23 MB/s instead of advertised 1000 MB/s

Community Support
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Just got my 250GB expansion card today and installed it in the back right slot. According to the product page it should hit 1000 MB/s read, but I’m only getting ~23 MB/s.

Tested with fio:

  • Read speed: 23.4 MB/s (should be ~1000 MB/s)

  • Device shows as sda with TRAN=usb in lsblk

  • dmesg shows: usb 6-1: new SuperSpeed Plus Gen 2x1 USB device

  • BIOS also lists it as USB

  • Reseated the module, no change

  • Also tried in front-right slot, no change

Any ideas what could cause such a huge speed drop?

(NixOS with a FW13 7840U)

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Hi @matthew_hre,

Welcome to the community!

I do not run Linux but it looks like the drive is registering as a USB 2.0 drive?

Or does SuperSpeed Plus Gen 2x1 mean a different standard?

USB 2.0 and ~23 MB/S sounds about right.

Hopefully someone with much more Linux experience can shed some different light on the issue. In the event that one side of the mainboard is recognizing the drive differently, consider trying the opposite side and see if runs at the same performance level.

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Thanks for the welcome! Have had my 13 for almost a year now, have loved it so far.

I believe “SuperSpeed Plus Gen 2x1” is USB 3.1 Gen 2 (not USB 2.0), which should do wayyy more than 23 MB/s.

I went and ran a test in all four slots, clocking in at around ~23 MB/s in all four. Was silly of me not to do this test earlier lol.

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Quick update: tried the tests on a buddy’s FW13 7640U, with basically no change - he’s seeing around ~26 MB/s in all slots. Starting to think I have a busted expansion card…

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Uh oh. Definitely file a ticket with support to get it sorted out.

There are so many USB “standards” and name references it is hard to keep track of them all with the extra marketing BS thrown in the mix too. It doesn’t help that many of the same terms keep getting reused across generations too.

Let us know how it turns out!

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Word of caution. Do not use ‘sudo lsusb’ as part of your testing. It stops some bits of usb from working.
I cold, power off, reboot restores it.
So do all speed tests without using lsusb before the test.

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Even usb2 should be more than that (somewhere in the high 40s would be expected for a semi decent usb ssd), hell most of my sub 1$ blob chip microsd readers are slightly faster than that and pretty much anything else is faster.

It is possible the thing is in some sort of limp-mode but that would not be a good or expected thing for a new device and on an old one it would mean get all your data off there asap and don’t tust it anymore.

If you can try it on some other computer, preferably some non framework windows machine, if it also does it there rma the thing if it doesn’t I suppose there is some os/hw compatibility issue to investigate.

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I’m not familiar with FIO, but I’m curious what kind of workload you were simulating when you got 23.4 MB/s.

I only ask because the performance is highly workload dependent, and you didn’t specify. For example, my 250GB expansion card gets 925.57 MB/s while testing “sequential 4MiB reads” while only getting 34.52 MB/s while testing “random 4KiB reads” with CrystalDiskMark.

I guess I’d just be curious what args you were passing.