Samsung 950 Pro SSD on Z97 ASRock Extreme4 Low Read/Write

[dhilt7xm]

I cloned my 500GB 850 Evo to a 512GB 950 Pro last night. I am getting about 800 MB/s read/write when I benchmark it. I have seen on many reviews that speeds twice this level or more are possible with this drive. I know that on the Extreme4 the M.2 is sharing lanes with the GPU (980 Ti), but I did not think it would affect it this much. I tried disabling SATA in the UEFI but that had no impact.

Samsung Magician is also not recognizing this drive as a Samsung drive, only letting me run the benchmark with no other options available. I'm running Windows 10 with an i7-4790K at 4.6. I also installed the NVMe driver from Samsung.

 

[baazing]

The reason you're only getting 800 MB/s reads and writes is because you're motherboards M.2 slot only supports 2 pcie 2.0 lanes which caps out at right around 1000 MB/s (theoretically). I'm also pretty sure it doesn't share lanes with your graphics card, it appears to be routed through the PCH, which is why they're pcie 2.0 lanes as opposed to pcie 3.0. I pulled the excerpt below from your motherboards newegg product page:

M.2 Socket (PCIe Gen2 x2 & SATA3)

The onboard M.2 socket is a new interface for connecting Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) solid state drives or other devices. ASRock supports M.2 SATA3 6Gb/s modules and M.2 PCI Express modules up to Gen2 x2 10Gb/s, which is 2X faster compared to other M.2 Gen2 x1 solutions that are limited to 5Gb/s.


As far as Magician goes I'm at loss. I recently upgraded from 840 pro to a 950 pro 512GB myself (with a clean win10 install) and my Magician Software does everything but RAPID (not supported on our drive yet) and OS Optimizations. The security features, firmware update, benchmarking, and overprovisioning all work fine for me.

 

[The Original Ralph]

what baazing said about the M.2 socket on your mobo, X2 - when i had my xp941 installed on a Z97 board's M.2 socket i was seeing 770 MB/s read

for Magician to recognize it, you'll need to install samsung's NVMe driver for the 950 - about halfway down the page at

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/downloads.html?CID=AFL-hq-mul-0813-11000170.

Just noticed you said you had installed it - you might want to make sure you're using the latest version of magician - samsung just released 4.8 a couple of weeks ago with the 950 and have since updated it already to 4.9. It will show you if the samsung nvme driver is the controller your ssd is using. Or you could go into Device Manager. If you don't see the samsung nvme driver listed, try installing it again

and Samsung data migration is a great cloning tool for this drive - i used to hate the samsung migration software till this version - it cloned my xp941 over to the 950 in under 10 minutes, and cloned it flawlessly - didn't even need to use the windows dvd to "repair" the boot files

 

[Ewitte]

ASRock Z97 should be 3.0 and x4 (most of the others were not). Did you try manually setting to PCIe 3.0 in the BIOS?

How did you clone it I got an "access violation" trying to open the data migration software?

 

[baazing]

Forgot to put this in my first post, but you can get the full bandwidth for this ssd if you buy an M.2 pcie adapter card, just be sure it says it uses pcie 3.0 x4 so that you'll get proper support. I found one on Newegg as an example of what to look for:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G3435358&cm_re=pcie_ssd_adapter-_-12K-017B-00001-_-Product

As long as you aren't planning on going SLI/Crossfire this should do you just fine. If you do plan on a multi gpu setup in the future, you'll have to move it back to the m.2 slot as you'll want 8x pcie lanes for each of your cards.

 

[Ewitte]

That is the adapter I use on my z87 board.