M.2 drive booting Windows 7 slower than original SSD

[nmck04]

Hi all,

So I know this has been covered because I have been scouring the internet looking for solution, of which there have been plenty suggested, but none that seem to apply to me, and the more I read, the more confused I am becoming.

Basically, I used to boot to Windows 7 from my Samsung 850 Evo SSD. It was great. Pretty quick etc. It was an MBR drive and booted in AHCI. Again that was fine. Didn't cause any problems. Worked as it should.

My motherboard (Gigabyte GA-z97X-SLI LGA 1150) has an M.2 port on it. I thought id get one and try it out. My idea was to boot from the new drive (Samsung 960 EVO NVMe) and run programs from it for shorter load times etc. I was not expecting a huge decrease but maybe a slight one. After a bit of messing about (flashing MOBO firmware and installing drivers) I got it working. I cloned my original SSD to it and booted from it. It worked...but it is significantly slower to boot than my original drive. Once into windows it operates well, but boot times are like 1min 30ish now. The original boot times were around 10-15 seconds. There doesn't seem to be any hang up in the BIOS though. The major delay is after POST. Once the Gigabyte symbol has flashed on the screen and disappeared, I am left looking at a black screen for the remaining time until windows login shows up. After login, the rest loads normally.

Now having cloned the drive, the NVMe drive was initialized as MBR like the original SSD. I didn't think it would matter since the drive size is only 240gb. I have been reading online now though and a lot of people suggest that GPT is better (which I thought only suitable for Windows 10), and not only that but to boot UEFI.

So down to my question. If it is possible, could I convert the NVMe drive to GPT using a program (maybe EaseUS or something) and then change the mobo settings to UEFI instead of AHCI? Would this fix my problem? Or is a completely fresh install now needed to rectify the boot times? I would ideally not want to fresh install windows as that would mean losing some programs that I would not be able to get back.

I realize that its not a huge issue, and although I didn't expect much of a decrease, I certainly didn't expect any increases in load times, but after paying for what should be a faster drive, I would like to at least try to get it working properly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

You're never going to get more than half speed out of that drive because your M2 slot is a PCI-E 2.0 x4 interface providing 10Gb/s of bandwidth. You need a newer board with a full speed PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface providing 32Gb/s to run an NVMe drive at full speed.

I GUESS it supports booting from NVMe since it works eventually. NVMe is a newer interface and support for Z97 was added as an afterthought. Z170 is the first chipset with native compatibility. I know Asus added support for all their Z97 boards via BIOS updates but I'm not sure about Gigabyte. I don't actually see anything on the board's web page.

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/GA-Z97X-SLI-rev-10#sp

You have the latest Samsung NVMe driver?

Edit: You must boot through UEFI for NVMe.

 

[nmck04]

You're never going to get more than half speed out of that drive because your M2 slot is a PCI-E 2.0 x4 interface providing 10Gb/s of bandwidth. You need a newer board with a full speed PCI-E 3.0 x4 interface providing 32Gb/s to run an NVMe drive at full speed.

I GUESS it supports booting from NVMe since it works eventually. NVMe is a newer interface and support for Z97 was added as an afterthought. Z170 is the first chipset with native compatibility. I know Asus added support for all their Z97 boards via BIOS updates but I'm not sure about Gigabyte. I don't actually see anything on the board's web page.

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/GA-Z97X-SLI-rev-10#sp

You have the latest Samsung NVMe driver?

Edit: You must boot through UEFI for NVMe.

Ah right. Well that very well could be the case then. I did wonder because it is a fairly old board now. It was more of an assumption that if they provided the port for it then it should work to full capacity. It did require me to flash the mobo before it would even register as a drive, so you are probably right.

Would I just be better then keeping the original SSD as my boot drive since it was getting far better boot speeds? And maybe just use the M.2 as extra storage in the mean time?

Thanks
Neil.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

M2 isn't truly universal for all the devices available with that format. For example, you can get an 850 Evo ( and just about every other SSD on the market ) in M2 format that has the same NAND and controller as the SATA version and is the same speed. Some slots only support SATA controller drives like that while others are universal. If you don't know exactly what you're looking at ( and even if you do ) it can get confusing.

It's expensive storage but that might be your best bet.

I have a 512GB 950 Pro in my desktop and honestly there's barely any difference from the 500GB 840 Evo it replaced in day to day use. Unless you're working with specific applications that benefit from a faster drive it's not really an amazing difference despite how it looks on paper.

 

[nmck04]

M2 isn't truly universal for all the devices available with that format. For example, you can get an 850 Evo ( and just about every other SSD on the market ) in M2 format that has the same NAND and controller as the SATA version and is the same speed. Some slots only support SATA controller drives like that while others are universal. If you don't know exactly what you're looking at ( and even if you do ) it can get confusing.

It's expensive storage but that might be your best bet.

I have a 512GB 950 Pro in my desktop and honestly there's barely any difference from the 500GB 840 Evo it replaced in day to day use. Unless you're working with specific applications that benefit from a faster drive it's not really an amazing difference despite how it looks on paper.

Well I do a lot of photo editing anf the likes and the move up to 4k res started to put a bit of strain on my computer. I thought a bit of faster storage might alleviate the problem a little or even running programs like Photoshop from an NVMe might have helped.

Anyways thanks for your input. A mobo upgrade might be on the horizon...but for now ill stick with what I have.

Cheers.
Neil

 

[Deleted member 217926]

You can still use it as a scratch disk. That should help with Photoshop quite a bit.

 

[ko888]

The Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI's M.2 socket is PCIe 2.0 x2. There are only two PCIe 2.0 lanes connected from the Z97 chipset to the M.2 socket. Those same two lanes are also shared with the SATA Express connector and SATA ports 4 and 5. Installing an M.2 device will disable the SATA Express and SATA 4 and 5 ports.

 

[nmck04]

You can still use it as a scratch disk. That should help with Photoshop quite a bit.

Yeah that's not a bad idea. Ill look into. Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

That PCI-E 2.0 x2 m.2 port is exactly why my Z97 ASRock does not have a NVMe drive in it.

Changing from the current 500GB 850 EVO would have resulted in only one thing...a thinner wallet.
And my system is all SSD (5 of them).

New drive types and older boards is not a slamdunk for a performance boost.