Samsung 960 Pro - cannot get advertised speeds

[Canadacpu]

Hi All,

Hoping you can help me out with this one. I cannot get my Samsung 960 Pro to put up advertised numbers. I tried Samsung Magician and Crystal Disk for benchmark.

I used to get ~2600 MB/s (never could get 3,200 MB/s). Now after the Windows 10 1803 update, I cannot break 1900 MB/s. It is bench-marking WAY below advertised.

Details:

- Asus X299 TUF Mark 1 Mobo
- i7 7820X CPU, Titan X GPU, 32GB RAM, AX860 PSU
- The 960 Pro is in a M.2 slot, and they are PCI-E 3.0 X4 capable.
- I am not using all my SATA ports
- Latest BIOS installed
- Samsung NVMe driver installed
- Samsung Magician says current Samsung driver is being used, but Windows Device manager reports it's using a Windows Driver.

The mobo has these footnotes which I think I understand but it's possible I'm missing something:

1. PCIEX4_1 max. at x1 mode and or shared with PCIEX16_3 when using 28 / 16 lane CPU; PCIEX4_2 max. at x4 mode;
2. SATA6G_5/6/7/8 share bandwidth with PCIEX4_2.

The only thing I can think of is that I have too many SATA HDDs plugged in (6) however if they are truly sharing bandwidth and not doing anything at the time, I would assume it shouldn't affect the benchmark. I also think only one of the M2 slots shares bandwidth with the SATA ports. The most unusual thing is I could get 2600 MB/s before the W10 1803 update which wasn't bad, and now I'm down to 1,900 with no system changes.

Thanks!

 

[Darkbreeze]

Couple of things possible.

One, patches by both Microsoft and motherboard vendors, by way of Windows AND bios updates, have caused performance hits for various configurations across the board due to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. This can affect both CPU and storage performance. IDK if this is a possible issue for YOUR system, but it is A possibility for all systems.

Two, it's not unusual to see performance issues or other glitches after an update, but especially after several of them.

I'd recommend you start by trying to do a clean install of the current Windows release. On the update page for the 1803 build, download the installation files and create media, then perform a clean install.

More often than not, a clean install of a specific build has far better results than cumulative updates of Windows releases.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3567655/clean-installation-windows.html

 

[Canadacpu]

Thank you for your reply. I was hoping to not have to use the "nuclear" approach and deal with reinstalling windows.

I have since read about bugs with Samsung Magician - are there any SSD benchmarking programs that are more reliable?

 

[Darkbreeze]

I have a 960 EVO, and I only use Magician to initially set aside a portion of the drive for failure provisioning after which I uninstall Magician. As you say, there are too many apparent issues with newer versions of the software and older versions tend to not work with newer drives.

The benchmarking utility that I like to use, and many of the testing and review sites also use this, is AS SSD benchmark.

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6014-as-ssd-benchmark.html


Some also like Crystaldisk.

 

[Canadacpu]

Thought I would update - I tried Crystal Disk Mark and I'm getting 3038 MB/s read / 1981 MB/s write. WAY better and much closer to advertised max speeds. The only number that is still low is the 4K Q32TI ( 584 MB/s) but it seems like only the 2TB versions of the drive can do better there (mine is 512GB). Either way I feel a lot better. Samsung Magician is bugged I guess.

Thanks again for your time.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Glad to help.