Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe Drive - Low Performance on SSD
Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2015 6:58 am
Anyone seen low performance on the Samsung SM951 NVMe drives personally or on another site? I got my hands on a Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD and the write performance on it is terrible for some reason. I'm talking sequential write speeds of just 25MB/s and 4K Random writes of under 1MB/s. The sequential read speeds are right where they are supposed to be at 2150MB/s. No matter the benchmark (CrystalDiskMark, ATTO, AS SSD, Anvil or IOMeter) the write performance is always bad.
The other thing I noticed is that I can't secure erase the drive. The option to perform a secure erase on the Samsung SM951 NVMe doens't show up in Parted Magic or Samsung Magician v4.6 software.
Then to make matters even stranger the built-in performance test in Samsung Magician v4.6 software shows the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive is hitting 2247 MB/s sequential read and 1440 MB/s sequential write with a 4K Random Read of 173,000 IOPS and a 4K Random Write of 110,000 IOPS. The Samsung SM951 AHCI version has max 4K Random IOPS of 90,000 read and 70,000 write, so the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive is up where we expected it to be. Those numbers sound great, but why won't any other benchmark show that?
Also, no smart data is shown on the drive. Could a temperature sensor be bad and the drive be throttling due to the sensor error?
I'm running an ASUS X99 Sabertooth Board with the latest UEFI (v1702) and Windows 8.1 64-bit with all available updates. Samsung doesn't have NVMe drivers, so I am running the Microsoft NVMe drivers that come in Windows 8.1 The drive shows up in the UEFI properly as an NVMe drive. I have tried the ASUS HHHL M.2 add-in card and in the boards integrated M.2 slot and the performance is the same.
I was just curious if anyone else out there has experienced similar issues and might know of a solution!
The other thing I noticed is that I can't secure erase the drive. The option to perform a secure erase on the Samsung SM951 NVMe doens't show up in Parted Magic or Samsung Magician v4.6 software.
Then to make matters even stranger the built-in performance test in Samsung Magician v4.6 software shows the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive is hitting 2247 MB/s sequential read and 1440 MB/s sequential write with a 4K Random Read of 173,000 IOPS and a 4K Random Write of 110,000 IOPS. The Samsung SM951 AHCI version has max 4K Random IOPS of 90,000 read and 70,000 write, so the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive is up where we expected it to be. Those numbers sound great, but why won't any other benchmark show that?
Also, no smart data is shown on the drive. Could a temperature sensor be bad and the drive be throttling due to the sensor error?
I'm running an ASUS X99 Sabertooth Board with the latest UEFI (v1702) and Windows 8.1 64-bit with all available updates. Samsung doesn't have NVMe drivers, so I am running the Microsoft NVMe drivers that come in Windows 8.1 The drive shows up in the UEFI properly as an NVMe drive. I have tried the ASUS HHHL M.2 add-in card and in the boards integrated M.2 slot and the performance is the same.
I was just curious if anyone else out there has experienced similar issues and might know of a solution!