Samsung SM951 NVMe

D3lirious said:
Cheers,

All I did was boot Win10 from USB, the installer found the drive and it installed OK. It's def the boot drive.
Click to expand...

And you've definitely got the three partitions on your boot drive?
(IE. recovery partition, EFI system partition and the primary partition).
There is a fourth partition, but you can't see this with Windows disc management... need to use the command line to see it. This is the Microsoft reserved partition. I'm assuming here that the Windows installer installed in EFI mode.

Running latest BIOS (obvious comment I know)?

What does ATTO benchmark look like (screen print if possible)?

If you look at (but don't run ) AS SSD. Does the stuff in the info box look OK?
(two items should be in green with a tick). These are the controller and the offset/alignment.

I'll assume you know the basics (EG. only have the drive you are installing to connected when installing Windows etc. etc.) and wont insult your intelligence with basic stuff.

Unluckily, as far as I know... there is nothing yet out there that can read the SMART data. So that's no help.

PS. Never hurts after a new OS install, to check that all Windows files are intact (IE. run the System File Checker). Paranoid I am. Good job to. As initially I had certain windows (especially the Windows Settings) close on me of their own free will. Ran SFC /scannow from elevated command prompt and it found a couple of borked files and corrected them. Probably not your case, but worth a try.
 
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mikeo said:
Yep... that should be achievable I would think.

But the boot time depends on a number of things. Depends on if your into optimizing it as far as possible. For example:

- Don't forget that on Windows 10, when you shutdown... it's not really a full shutdown. It's a form of hybrid shutdown (IE. Windows writes stuff to the hibernate file to speed your next boot up). So this has an effect as well.
Got this disabled myself.
- Most BIOS's have an option to prevent it looking for other boot devices. It's called MSI Fast Boot on my board.

Never quite sure myself (no disrespect intended) why people get so hung up on boot times. Can't say myself I care much if it's 8 seconds, or 12 seconds.

But basically... yes it's fast.
But then again, so would any half decent SATA SSD be.
Click to expand...

i dont see if i would see any day to day difference to SSD i use now, but love fact it just slots in , no cables

would imagine if your extracting big files within drive or playing games off it then would see a difference, but i dont use OS drive to install games or extract unless drive is big

my bootup seems slower then it was on my old AMD system using same SSD, i get the windows spinning bootup for 3-4secs, before it would just flick passed it,
 
got it booting faster now, enabled boot up to turbo boost, disabled all other storage devices , just drive with OS , seems to done the trick
 
uscool said:
i dont see if i would see any day to day difference to SSD i use now, but love fact it just slots in , no cables

would imagine if your extracting big files within drive or playing games off it then would see a difference, but i dont use OS drive to install games or extract unless drive is big

my bootup seems slower then it was on my old AMD system using same SSD, i get the windows spinning bootup for 3-4secs, before it would just flick passed it,
Click to expand...

What version of windows were your two systems on?

Always loads of ways to speed boot up.
Depends on how much effort you want to put into it :)

I just fancied this particular piece of tech. Difficult to justify it price wise.
just got to be done ;)
 
uscool said:
got it booting faster now, enabled boot up to turbo boost, disabled all other storage devices , just drive with OS , seems to done the trick
Click to expand...

I was about to say check your BIOS / each specific mobo has a recommended settings for NVMe. But it seems you've solved it now.
 
mikeo said:
And you've definitely got the three partitions on your boot drive?
(IE. recovery partition, EFI system partition and the primary partition).
There is a fourth partition, but you can't see this with Windows disc management... need to use the command line to see it. This is the Microsoft reserved partition. I'm assuming here that the Windows installer installed in EFI mode.

Running latest BIOS (obvious comment I know)?

What does ATTO benchmark look like (screen print if possible)?

If you look at (but don't run ) AS SSD. Does the stuff in the info box look OK?
(two items should be in green with a tick). These are the controller and the offset/alignment.

I'll assume you know the basics (EG. only have the drive you are installing to connected when installing Windows etc. etc.) and wont insult your intelligence with basic stuff.

Unluckily, as far as I know... there is nothing yet out there that can read the SMART data. So that's no help.

PS. Never hurts after a new OS install, to check that all Windows files are intact (IE. run the System File Checker). Paranoid I am. Good job to. As initially I had certain windows (especially the Windows Settings) close on me of their own free will. Ran SFC /scannow from elevated command prompt and it found a couple of borked files and corrected them. Probably not your case, but worth a try.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the detailed help:)

I've checked disk management and there's definitely 3 partitions, recovery, EFI and C: (boot). I've just updated to 0802 BIOS, no changes.

D: (storage disk) was unplugged when I installed windows. There are two items with a green tick in AS SSD. I wouldn't have thought corrupt files would be a problem. I might run that file checker a bit later.

Meanwhile, here's some screenies of benchmarks - pretty terrible, lol. I gave up on the AS SSD test as it was taking ages to run at that speed.

Ql0oUVM.png

MO9shsu.png


It seems that I'm not alone with issues with this drive. There's a couple of threads with people with similar problems.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1551060/official-samsung-sm951-owners-club/460
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthre...write-speed-after-10-mins-in-Windows-10/page7

Apparently the drive being OEM means it's completely unsupported by Samsung so if I can't sort it within about a week I'll have to return it.
Alternatively there are other drivers (Intel/Samsung) that people are having better luck with (instead the Microsoft driver) but it seems a bit risky with possible lack of TRIM support and some folks being unable to boot after switching.
 
D3lirious

One word of warning about AS SSD.
For it to work properly, it MUST be installed on C: (IE. boot drive).
As if it's installed anywhere else, it tries to write to C: which it doesn't have the correct permission to do and throws a wobbly.

Not saying this is your real issue. But if AS SSD is taking a long time to run, this will be why.

NB. Assuming you bought from ocUK. Then you have 14 days to return it for a full refund. One advantage of buying from them as far as I'm concerned.

Reason for return Notification Notification time from delivery date Entitlement
Unwanted 14 days Full refund*

As you say. Ultimately you can either RMA it, or return it under the Distance Selling regs.
 
D3lirious said:
Bought from a competitor, but also with 14 days to return.
Click to expand...

Fair enough. I can guess who.

I personally would not mess about with the native NVMe drivers, as I would have thought they should be reasonably mature by now. And they work just fine for me.

I'll do a bit of digging later on and see if I can come up with anything for you.

Bit of a sod really :mad:
 
cheers m8 but managed to sort it I think, although not sure how exactly.

I didn't think of the most obvious step of disconnecting other drives (a SATA HD and SATA optical) and trying to boot with just the SSD. But I did and suddenly found I was getting much better speeds.

So then I shut down and connected the other drives again expecting to have to disconnect each in turn to see which one (or both) was causing the issue but surprisingly it was still showing the same fast speeds with everything connected. So the issue seems to be resolved despite having the same 3 overall drives connected as before. Strange...

Anyway, here are some (much better) results:

ZUCXCeT.png


OYI2FF5.png


0uoCyPV.png
 
Just noticed something really odd. In the AS SSD screenshots I posted, it shows a different firmware revision before and after.

The only thing I can think of that caused this is that I had downloaded the Samsung NVMe driver from the HP website, but it wouldn't let me change the driver anyway. I clicked update drive under properties and pointed it at the driver location but it told me that the already installed driver was the 'best' and I couldn't change it. I then right-clicked the .inf file and tried to install that way, and although it said 'installed successfully' it still shows Microsoft as the current driver in device manager. I wouldn't have thought any of this could affect firmware though...
 
Results look spot on now. Good show.

I just can't see how any of this could have updated the firmware in the drive myself! I'm as confused as you are!!

But on the face of it, looks like the firmware "has" changed and you are also running a different driver for it. Weird.

If I had to guess... I'd say there's a bit of bug in the BIOS for this board and somehow disconnecting the only other things onn the SATA bus seems to have corrected things. Still weird though.

Lets hope this is the end of your problems :)

NB. BXW7 is an earlier firmware for this drive.
Confused I am.
 
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Hi folks...

Has anyone tried the NVMe driver for the Samsung 950 pro with the SM951 drive?

If so... is it a boot drive (or data only drive)?
and any problems / issues?
and what firmware is in the SM951 you have?

It's just that I've read that you can now read the SMART data off the SM951 if running the Samsung NVMe driver (yes I know it's only supposed to be for the 950 pro). Not sure if this is true, as I thought that Samsung disabled SMART functionality in the latest firmware in the SM951.
 
Anyone here using the drives on a older motherboard without native support and with that Asus adapter?

I want to get one for my Z87 set up but i wont bother if its a pain to install. I also want to know if there are any issues with drive cloning, as i cba with installing w7 and upgrading.

Any reason to go AHCI over nvme?
 
Regardless of what some folks have posted on other forums ... I don't think the NVMe driver for the Samsung 950 pro works / installs correctly for the SM951.

Decided to try it myself.

From looking at Device Manager ... While it appears to replace the "standard NVM Express Controller" with the Samsung one. If you check what driver the actual drive is running, it still looks to be the native Windows NVMe driver! Unless I'm misunderstanding what I'm seeing. May explain why some that have tried this have commented that there appears to be no difference. It also kicked out dozens of warning messages in Windows Event Viewer when it was installing the driver (needless to say I could not understand any of them).

O'well. Worth a try. Not like it's running too badly under the Windows 10 native NVMe driver anyway.
 
Avenged7Fold said:
Anyone here using the drives on a older motherboard without native support and with that Asus adapter?

I want to get one for my Z87 set up but i wont bother if its a pain to install. I also want to know if there are any issues with drive cloning, as i cba with installing w7 and upgrading.

Any reason to go AHCI over nvme?
Click to expand...

Using it fine on z77 with modified bios and Asus adapter
 
Avenged7Fold said:
Anyone here using the drives on a older motherboard without native support and with that Asus adapter?
Click to expand...

I am using a 950 Pro in the Asus Hyper adapter installed in a X79 Rampage IV Black. Seems to work, however getting some odd benchmark results with both read & write IOPS. I have tried both the standard Microsoft and Samsung Nvme express Win10 drivers without much of a performance change.
 
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