Samsung 950 PRO not reaching full speeds

[alexr123456]

I just installed my 950 pro in a pcie 4x card I bought on amazon. I cloned my old drive over with no problems and installed the nvme drivers from samsungs website. However I am having trouble reaching full read speeds. I have a hunch it has to do with my outdated processor and motherboard. I am using an FX-8350 with a MSI 990XA-GD55 which only supports PCIE 2.0 .See screenshots below.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[dcmarchbank]

Hi alexr123456,

Did you ever find a solution to this, I'm currently getting very similar transfer rates.

 

[rcald2000]

Please read:

Upgrade FROM Intel 750 TO Samsung 950 Pro - Random Read (IOPS) below spec
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2907040/upgrade-intel-750-samsung-950-pro-random-read-iops-spec.html

 

[rcald2000]

By the way, I believe your issue is partially explained by my thread. In addition, your motherboard supporting only PCIe 2.0 is certainly a contributing factor. Your CPU "might" be another contributing factor, but I'm not entirely sure about that. When I ran a performance benchmark via Samsung Magician, my 5820K only increased to 10% total utilization, but perhaps that doesn't tell the whole story. One other thing: I have the 512 GB version, which I believe is a little faster than the 256 GB drive.

 

[dcmarchbank]

By the way, I believe your issue is partially explained by my thread. In addition, your motherboard supporting only PCIe 2.0 is certainly a contributing factor. Your CPU "might" be another contributing factor, but I'm not entirely sure about that. When I ran a performance benchmark via Samsung Magician, my 5820K only increased to 10% total utilization, but perhaps that doesn't tell the whole story. One other thing: I have the 512 GB version, which I believe is a little faster than the 256 GB drive.

Hi rcald2000!

I'm not entirely sure what you are saying the "solution" or explanation is, sorry if I've missed something.

I'm running a more powerful system with my M.2 port on Gen 3 but still maintain VERY similar results to OP.

This is the thread I created to combat my issue: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2917668/samsung-950-pro-full-speed.html

If you have any info please fire it my way I'll gladly try anything I can. I've still to reformat but I haven't yet as I was trying some advice from Asus (Reset CMOS & Force Gen3 on the slot). Neither worked.

 

[rcald2000]

@dcmarchbank, how's it going? I'm not posing a solution per se. The forum post I referenced above & below sounds similar to your issue. When you read it in it's entirety, do you think it might explain your problem?

Upgrade FROM Intel 750 TO Samsung 950 Pro - Random Read (IOPS) below spec
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2907040/upgrade-intel-750-samsung-950-pro-random-read-iops-spec.html

 

[dcmarchbank]

Not great, but hope isn't lost at all, because I've seen a bunch of other people with very similar results to mine so it could just be a driver/bios issue somewhere at this point.

So from your thread I'm seeing potential bottleneck? The reason I think this isn't the case is because even though none of us are getting 100% from our drives, you are still getting 185k IOPS Random Read and I am still only getting 100K, despite the same CPU at the same frequencies. So if the bottleneck was the case, I'd be getting 185k the same as you.

The other idea on your thread is the potential for less performance as the drive becomes full (or just more data at all). Currently my drive is at <50% full. I'm honestly not sure if that could really effect my performance this much.

These guys had similar speeds to me, which turned out to be an overclocking issue (start of 3rd paragraph): http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2015/11/11/samsung-ssd-950-pro-review/1

 

[alexr123456]

Upgraded from FX-8350 to intel 4790k and that fixed my problem. The issue was that the fx-8350 does not support PCIE 3.0 and the 950 pro requires PCIE 3.0 to reach it's full bandwith.

 

[alexr123456]

By the way, I believe your issue is partially explained by my thread. In addition, your motherboard supporting only PCIe 2.0 is certainly a contributing factor. Your CPU "might" be another contributing factor, but I'm not entirely sure about that. When I ran a performance benchmark via Samsung Magician, my 5820K only increased to 10% total utilization, but perhaps that doesn't tell the whole story. One other thing: I have the 512 GB version, which I believe is a little faster than the 256 GB drive.

My FX-8350 only supported PCIE 2.0. Upgrading to a 4790k and Asus Z97-A solved my problem.

 

[rcald2000]

Fascinating! I did not know that about the FX-8350. Thank you for sharing that information. What led you to that conclusion? I'm always interesting in not just learning the answer, but how people reach those conclusions.

 

[alexr123456]

Fascinating! I did not know that about the FX-8350. Thank you for sharing that information. What led you to that conclusion? I'm always interesting in not just learning the answer, but how people reach those conclusions.

I figured out the FX-8350 was the problem using the Samsung Magician software. In the screenshot below, it is indicating that the SSD is only capable of 5gbps out of a possible 10gbps even though it was utilizing 4 PCI lanes.

I did some quick googling about PCIE 2.0 vs 3.0 bandwidth and figured that was my problem because there wasn't any other reason it would only be running at 5gbps rather than 10gbps. After buying a new cpu and mobo that support PICE 3.0 I took this screenshot.

You can see that it is still using 4 PCI lanes but is getting the full 10gbps bandwidth that it needs.

 

[hurricane28]

I just installed my 950 pro in a pcie 4x card I bought on amazon. I cloned my old drive over with no problems and installed the nvme drivers from samsungs website. However I am having trouble reaching full read speeds. I have a hunch it has to do with my outdated processor and motherboard. I am using an FX-8350 with a MSI 990XA-GD55 which only supports PCIE 2.0 .See screenshots below.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi,

I have the same CPU only a different motherboard and i get similar results only you get slightly higher read MB/s and your IOPS are much higher than mine.. I only get 75K read IOPS and around 65K write IOPS.. I tried every setting possible without result.

I have all my drivers installed and the BIOS is the latest version. I had this before on the Samsung 850 pro tho but i couldn't find what is causing this weird issue i have.