Fixing Your Degraded NVMe And Getting Your Steam Downloads Back To Normal

If you are like me and have one of those cheap as possible M2 NVME drives included in your prebuilt PC, you may have run into the same issue. The drive is just too bogged down by write amplification and combined with how Steam handles downlaods, you are seeing speeds around 2-3 MB/s.

The threads are full of great suggestions that have worked for a lot of people, but that just was not the case for me.

What You've Probably Already Tried

• Update NVMe firmware via the manufacturer's SSD dashboard (Samsung Magician, WD Dashboard, Crucial Storage Executive, etc.)
• Reinstall chipset and NVMe drivers from your motherboard manufacturer's support page
• Switch your Windows power plan to High Performance or Ultimate Performance to rule out aggressive power state management
• Disable write caching — probably the most reliable solution.
• Confirm the problem with CrystalDiskMark to rule out software-side bottlenecks
• Verify PCIe lane speed in BIOS to make sure the drive is running at the right gen and isn't sharing lanes

All legitimate suggestions. And hopefully one fo those worked for you. But not for me. I use my PC primarily for gaming, so under the kind of sustained large sequential writes that Steam downloads produce — no driver update is going to fix it.

What's Actually Happening

NVMe drives use a portion of their NAND as a fast SLC write cache. When that cache fills up — which happens quickly during large continuous writes — the drive falls back to writing directly to slower TLC or QLC cells. On a healthy drive this is temporary. On a drive with accumulated write amplification, poorly mapped sectors, or a degraded cache state, it can become the new normal. The drive never fully recovers on its own.

No amount of rebooting or driver-swapping resets this state. The only way out I have found, is a proper wipe.

The Fix

Step 1: Back Everything Up

This is a full wipe. If the drive has anything on it you want to keep, move it off first. There is no recovering data after this.

Step 2: Open Disk Management

Right-click the Start menu → Disk Management. Find your NVMe in the drive list. Right-click the volume and select Format. If the drive is unallocated, right-click and choose New Simple Volume to walk through the creation wizard.

When the format dialog appears, you will see a checkbox: "Perform a quick format."

Step 3: Let It Run

A full format on a large NVMe takes a while — potentially over an hour for a 2TB drive. Let it complete fully without interruption. The whole point is that it writes to every cell.

Step 4: Disable Write Caching

Once the drive is formatted and back online, open Device Manager (right-click Start → Device Manager).

1. Expand Disk drives
2. Right-click your NVMe → Properties
3. Click the Policies tab
4. Under "Write-caching policy," uncheck "Enable write caching on the device"
5. Click OK and reboot

This sounds counterintuitive — caching should be faster, right? The issue is that after a lot of sustained large writes, the write cache itself can become a source of overhead rather than an accelerator. Disabling it forces direct writes and, for drives in this degraded state, produces significantly more consistent throughput.

Verify the Fix

After rebooting, run CrystalDiskMark again. Sequential write speeds should look dramatically different. Steam downloads in particular — which are essentially one long sequential write after another — are usually where people notice the difference first.

If the numbers look right in the benchmark but downloads still feel slow, check whether Steam's download throttle is set in Settings → Downloads → Limit bandwidth to. It's easy to forget that setting exists.