Intel's New CPUs Throttle SSD Speeds — Users Look for Workarounds

Owners of the new Intel Core Ultra 200S (Arrow Lake) processors are reporting a surprising performance bottleneck with high-speed SSDs. When PCIe 5.0 drives are installed in M.2 slots on Z890 motherboards, their throughput drops by as much as 16% — maxing out at 12 GB/s instead of the advertised 14 GB/s. Interestingly, SSDs connected through expansion cards like the ASUS Hyper M.2 are unaffected.

Tests with the Samsung 9100 Pro and Micron 4600 show both drives reaching up to 12.3 GB/s on Z890/Arrow Lake platforms. However, the same drives hit 14.3 GB/s on older Z790 (Raptor Lake) systems. According to experts at The SSD Review, the issue stems from how the new CPUs are architected.

In Arrow Lake, the four PCIe 5.0 lanes used by M.2 slots are routed not directly to the CPU core (SoC), but through an I/O Extender module. This design adds latency and reduces effective bandwidth. Intel has acknowledged the issue, stating that performance differences will vary based on workload and SSD model — but also confirmed that no software fix is possible. Addressing it would require hardware-level changes.

Arrow Lake has already faced criticism for underperforming in games compared to its predecessor, Raptor Lake — even after firmware updates. The SSD slowdown adds further concern over Intel’s transition to a chiplet-based architecture. For now, users seeking peak SSD performance are advised to use PCIe add-in cards or stick with previous-generation motherboards.