Question Samsung 970 EVO plus runs at only 1800 mb/s in read?

[Euroman28]

Dear friends,

I own a Asus UX490UA laptop which came with a Samsung OEM NVME disk MZVLW512HMHJP - 00000 which according to Chrystal Disk Mark had a read speed over 2000 mb/s. I wanted faster readspeed/write and more space on my machine so I upgrade to a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1tb. However something strange have happened. The read/write speed on my Samsung 970 Plus is slower than those on my 4 year Samsung OEM drive (its produced on month 11. 2016).

So my question is what can be causing that a 2020 series 970 EVO plus (Even with the Samsung controller drivers installed) is slower than the a 4 year old drive?

Linked to pictures from HWINFO64, CDM and CDI. Screendumps

 

[Darkbreeze]

Where did you buy the drive?

Have you tried it WITHOUT the Samsung driver, because I did a test a while back when the 970 EVO (Non-Plus) was first released and consistently got better scores with the stock Windows NVME drivers than I did with the Samsung drivers. That was, admittedly, early on though. I would also check to see if there are any firmware updates available.

Depending on where you purchased it, it's possible you could have gotten a fake drive, or one that somebody heated and removed the sticker from and swapped with another drive, and then reboxed and sent back for a refund, and then it was sent back out to you without ever having been checked for genuine. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen that either.

 

[mdd1963]

Was this cloned to the new drive, or, freshly installed with latest Samsung NVME driver?

Those numbers are low for a 970 EVO however...

 

[Euroman28]

Freshly installed Windows 10 Pro.

Should I try to benchmark in my desktop machine? It has a spare NVME slot.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Worth a try. While it's a stretch, because the 970 EVO and EVO plus have reviewed well in terms of throttling, I guess it's possible that there is some disparity in the throttling provisions between the drive you were using and the Evo plus while in the confined space of the laptop. More data is always helpful, so see what it does in the desktop.

 

[Euroman28]

Where did you buy the drive?

Have you tried it WITHOUT the Samsung driver, because I did a test a while back when the 970 EVO (Non-Plus) was first released and consistently got better scores with the stock Windows NVME drivers than I did with the Samsung drivers. That was, admittedly, early on though. I would also check to see if there are any firmware updates available.

Depending on where you purchased it, it's possible you could have gotten a fake drive, or one that somebody heated and removed the sticker from and swapped with another drive, and then reboxed and sent back for a refund, and then it was sent back out to you without ever having been checked for genuine. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen that either.

I got it from a large retailer.

Worth a try. While it's a stretch, because the 970 EVO and EVO plus have reviewed well in terms of throttling, I guess it's possible that there is some disparity in the throttling provisions between the drive you were using and the Evo plus while in the confined space of the laptop. More data is always helpful, so see what it does in the desktop.

The ASUS machine original NVME was enclosed in heatsink bag/heatshield of some sort. I installed EVO plus in it. But could that bag be causing the low speeds?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yes, for certain. Install the drive exactly as it came from the box, without any additional cooling devices or heatsinks attached. See if there is a notable difference.

Getting it from a large retailer is really no guarantee either. We've seen plenty of drives, CPUs and other devices from Newegg and Amazon that were swapped by customers and returned, and then sent back out by those retailers to unsuspecting buyers, who came here, and then discovered what had happened. Like this, just as an example of how far these people will actually go to get over on retailers.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/cpu-won’t-fit-in-motherboard.3411892/#21632440

This is nothing new either.

Samsung says my SSD is Counterfeit.....

Looking for advice and help on how to proceed. Has this happened to anyone else? Backstory: • Bought 2 Samsung 960 Pro NVMe M.2 2TB Drives back in January 2018 as part of my new PC build. • These units were bought and shipped directly from Samsung. No third party in between. • Took a while...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Euroman28]

Thank you for your answer sadly removing the heatsink bag didn't change the read/write speed.

My machine is from 2018, and I googled the issues that I have with the EVO plus drive and the cap of 1800 mbs, and found this.

https://www.dell.com/community/Insp...-Compatibility-for-Inspiron-7472/td-p/6191905

It talk about a 2018 Dell which experience the same issue, that Samsung NVME 970 caps and 1800 mbs. I know mine is Asus, but could it be same problem GT2 vs. GT4? Do you by any chance know what GT2/GT4 stands for? And howto check which one ones computer uses ?

Yes, for certain. Install the drive exactly as it came from the box, without any additional cooling devices or heatsinks attached. See if there is a notable difference.

Getting it from a large retailer is really no guarantee either. We've seen plenty of drives, CPUs and other devices from Newegg and Amazon that were swapped by customers and returned, and then sent back out by those retailers to unsuspecting buyers, who came here, and then discovered what had happened. Like this, just as an example of how far these people will actually go to get over on retailers.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/cpu-won’t-fit-in-motherboard.3411892/#21632440

This is nothing new either.

Samsung says my SSD is Counterfeit.....

Looking for advice and help on how to proceed. Has this happened to anyone else? Backstory: • Bought 2 Samsung 960 Pro NVMe M.2 2TB Drives back in January 2018 as part of my new PC build. • These units were bought and shipped directly from Samsung. No third party in between. • Took a while...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Maxxify]

Ignore the GT2/GT4 part, what it means is that the laptop will throttle to effectively x2 PCIe lanes. I suspected that might be possible here but you said the older drive was faster plus I've seen reviews of that model with full-speed NVMe drives. However, it's certainly possible, even though the socket supports and reports x4 lanes it will only run at x2 in that mode.

 

[Euroman28]

Ignore the GT2/GT4 part, what it means is that the laptop will throttle to effectively x2 PCIe lanes. I suspected that might be possible here but you said the older drive was faster plus I've seen reviews of that model with full-speed NVMe drives. However, it's certainly possible, even though the socket supports and reports x4 lanes it will only run at x2 in that mode.

The funny thing is when I reinstalled the old nvme its just now equally as slow as the EVO plus. So what can I be doing wrong?

 

[Darkbreeze]

I doubt you are doing anything wrong, and in reality it is a solution in search of a problem because in real world usage you are NEVER going to see those kinds of speeds anyhow. The ONLY time you are EVER going to see those kinds of "theoretical" speeds is when running benchmarks OR possibly on a desktop when transferring files from NVME to NVME drive, or when reading one huge single file. For actual, real world use, 99% of what you do will not be sequential large file reads or writes. It will almost always be random reads and writes of substantially smaller groups of files, which normally will probably max you out at speeds not much different than standard SATA SSD speeds. Typically around 300-500Mbps, if you're lucky.

So the fact that both those drives are reading at "only" around 1800Mbps is actually not something that is all that important. Even if you were reading 3000Mbps on some synthetic benchmark, in real world use, you still wouldn't ever come anywhere near that kind of speed unless you were reading one huge file, only, or moving files from NVME to NVME and probably not even then unless, again, it was like one huge installer file or something.

 

[Euroman28]

I doubt you are doing anything wrong, and in reality it is a solution in search of a problem because in real world usage you are NEVER going to see those kinds of speeds anyhow. The ONLY time you are EVER going to see those kinds of "theoretical" speeds is when running benchmarks OR possibly on a desktop when transferring files from NVME to NVME drive, or when reading one huge single file. For actual, real world use, 99% of what you do will not be sequential large file reads or writes. It will almost always be random reads and writes of substantially smaller groups of files, which normally will probably max you out at speeds not much different than standard SATA SSD speeds. Typically around 300-500Mbps, if you're lucky.

So the fact that both those drives are reading at "only" around 1800Mbps is actually not something that is all that important. Even if you were reading 3000Mbps on some synthetic benchmark, in real world use, you still wouldn't ever come anywhere near that kind of speed unless you were reading one huge file, only, or moving files from NVME to NVME and probably not even then unless, again, it was like one huge installer file or something.

Thank you for your answer.

I installed the drive in my DESKTOP machine and got the following result in Samsung Magician.

https://imgur.com/a/x4jI99R

View: https://imgur.com/a/x4jI99R


2970 read and 3252 write.

and the old drive from Samsung gives me

2950 read and 1700 write in my desktop.

So I guess the drive thankfully isn't fake

my both my laptop and desktop both have an PCIE 3.0 x4 interface. So the question is could it a power limitation in my laptop ?

 

[Darkbreeze]

I doubt it's a power limitation but it might be as Maxxify said that that system is limited to x2 lanes, or as I said, that it's a temperature throttling issue. Could even be due to lack of adequate BIOS instruction support. Check the manufacturers pages to see if there is a newer BIOS version for that device.

 

[Euroman28]

I doubt it's a power limitation but it might be as Maxxify said that that system is limited to x2 lanes, or as I said, that it's a temperature throttling issue. Could even be due to lack of adequate BIOS instruction support. Check the manufacturers pages to see if there is a newer BIOS version for that device.

Again thanks for your reply. So what would you do? Keep the drive in? Or put the old one back? Or/and put the new one in my desktop? Or simply return the drive?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Since you aren't really seeing any terrific gains, I'd put the old one back in and maybe use it in the desktop. IDK, that's your call. I'm hard pressed to ever return hardware. Once I have it, it's getting used for something whether in one of my systems or a clients.

 

[Euroman28]

Since you aren't really seeing any terrific gains, I'd put the old one back in and maybe use it in the desktop. IDK, that's your call. I'm hard pressed to ever return hardware. Once I have it, it's getting used for something whether in one of my systems or a clients.

I just realised something. The machine only have one feature enabled under SATA - controller, AHCI. However after doing several Windows 10 re-installs it still doesn't recognize the SATA AHCI controller in Windows 10.

Any thoughts?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Are you talking about in the BIOS?

 

[Euroman28]

Are you talking about in the BIOS?

Yes.

No matter how many times I reinstall windows the AHCI controller isn't found. Even tried to manually install the driver from the asus website, but windows installer says the driver isn't compatible with hardware.

Its like windows can't see that there is ahci sata controller available. Eventhough the bios has it enabled.

Could said sata ahci controlled be broken? Regardless if it's shown in the bios ?

 

[Darkbreeze]

The BIOS is only concerned with hardware, EXCEPT for when it comes to the Windows boot manager. THAT it WILL recognize and configure as the first boot device, normally. That is normal and it should do that. As far as any "Windows SATA AHCI controllers" the BIOS won't see those because they don't load until AFTER the BIOS has already done it's POST run and has initiated any required hardware.

Check the BIOS again. If there are any RAID configurations enabled, as in the case of laptops that came with Optane cache's installed, then AHCI will NOT be an option, and in reverse, if there is a software RAID enabled, it might not see it then either. Not my best area but I'll point a friend here that might have more answers.

 

[Euroman28]

The BIOS is only concerned with hardware, EXCEPT for when it comes to the Windows boot manager. THAT it WILL recognize and configure as the first boot device, normally. That is normal and it should do that. As far as any "Windows SATA AHCI controllers" the BIOS won't see those because they don't load until AFTER the BIOS has already done it's POST run and has initiated any required hardware.

Check the BIOS again. If there are any RAID configurations enabled, as in the case of laptops that came with Optane cache's installed, then AHCI will NOT be an option, and in reverse, if there is a software RAID enabled, it might not see it then either. Not my best area but I'll point a friend here that might have more answers.

I don't if you are familar with a software called SiSoftware Sandra? I was refered to it on another forum.

If I run it then it find something wrong my machine. For instance it claims that the PCIE link speed is lower than maximum. (See link) https://imgur.com/a/MfQc0hm

If thats to be believed, maybe I have finally found out why the 970 EVO is running at 50 %. Any thoughts?

 

[Darkbreeze]

PCIe links ALWAYS run at lower than maximum UNTIL they are needed to run at the maximum. Generally they will only run at x8 speeds UNTIL they NEED to have x16 lanes available, and then they will switch to x16.

SisSoft Sandra is old software. It's not used much by enthusiasts anymore. HWinfo and GPU-Z are much more commonly used. It's fine though if you like it.

If you run that same report WHILE running Furmark or the Heaven benchmark, I think you'll see a different result there. If not, then it's likely a problem with the card or motherboard, possibly.

 

[tanay24]

Dear friends,

I own a Asus UX490UA laptop which came with a Samsung OEM NVME disk MZVLW512HMHJP - 00000 which according to Chrystal Disk Mark had a read speed over 2000 mb/s. I wanted faster readspeed/write and more space on my machine so I upgrade to a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1tb. However something strange have happened. The read/write speed on my Samsung 970 Plus is slower than those on my 4 year Samsung OEM drive (its produced on month 11. 2016).

So my question is what can be causing that a 2020 series 970 EVO plus (Even with the Samsung controller drivers installed) is slower than the a 4 year old drive?

Linked to pictures from HWINFO64, CDM and CDI. Screendumps

Even I'm facing the same issue just that I own the 500GB version of the 970 Evo Plus and I have the HP Pavilion 15-ck069tx laptop. Were you able to figure out the reason for the same? If so then please help me too so that the issue can be resolved.
Regards,
Tanay