[SOLVED] Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB very slow using PCIe x2

[MorganDollar]

Just bought and install a Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB to my motherboard M.2 slot.

Specs:
Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 2TB installed on mobo M.2 slot
Mobo: Gigabyte x99-cli-cf
32gb DDR4 CPU
Geforce 1070 installed on a PCIe slot.

I'm aware this mobo only support PCIe x2 for the M.2 slot, but my Crystal Disk Mark benchmark speed is way lower than what I found online for people using PCIe x2. None of my benchmark speed is above 900MB/s. I saw others having at least 1500 MB/s in Q8T1 in Crystal Disk Mark. Are my numbers normal? Will using a M.2 to PCIe adapter helps (so I can put the adapter to the x8 slot). This is a Win 10 boot drive.

Somehow I cannot attach image here. I uploaded to Google Drive -- Crystal Disk Mark Image

 

[Colif]

have you got the samsung nvme drivers installed?

there is a restriction regarding cpu - Recommended minimum system configuration is Intel Haswell Refresh Processor, 2GB RAM, 50MB free disk space and UEFI Bios v2.3. - I don't know what you have
look under samsung nvme driver - https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/

Off motherboard website - Socket 3, M key, type 2260/2280 SATA & PCIe x2/x1 SSD support

PCIe 1.x - 250Mb/s per lane (4x = 4 lanes)
PCIe 2.0 - 500Mb/s per lane (thus 4x PCIe 2.0 is 2Gb/s)
PCIe 3.0 - 1000Mb/s per lane ( thus 4x PCIe 3.0 is 4Gb/s)

This SSD is not going to run at 100 percent maximum theoretical speed for the Bus.

https://www.dell.com/community/Opti...060-SAMSUNG-970-EVO-PCIe-2-0-x-4/td-p/6133644

Now i wonder if your board is giving pci 2 x2 or x4. if its only x2 then 2x500 is pretty close to 900 given you won't get max speed per lane. I can't find enough on subject, manual isn't helpful. block diagram on page 8 could lead me to believe its just 2 x lanes - https://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/Manual/mb_manual_ga-x99-sli_e.pdf

 

[MorganDollar]

I installed the samsung nvme drivers.
CPU is a 2.40GHz Xeon E5 v3 (Haswell).
I have 32GB RAM DDR4
2TB disk space on the SSD + 6TB in other 2 hard drives.


My motherboard should support PCIe 3.0. Should my SSD at least be ran as PCIe 3.0 x2?


Will using a PCIe adapter helps so I can put it on the PCIe x8 slots?

 

[Colif]

My motherboard should support PCIe 3.0. Should my SSD at least be ran as PCIe 3.0 x2?

According to spec sheet for motherboard
Chipset:
1 x M.2 PCIe connector
(Socket 3, M key, type 2260/2280 SATA & PCIe x2/x1 SSD support)

I think I must be reading that wrongly

 

[Maxxify]

The M.2 connector is only 10 Gbps (x2 PCIe 2.0). You can see this in the manual, as it's labeled "M2_10G" for a reason. After overhead and encoding this is ~900 MB/s. An adapter in a PCIe slot would get full speed.

 

[MorganDollar]

Thanks for the info!

I'm currently using the M.2 drive as the Windows 10 boot drive. I achieved this by going to BIOS and disabled CSM. The drive partition is using GPT now. It boots without any issue.

If I buy a PCIE adapter card, is there anything I need to tweak in order to make this M.2 drive (on PCIE adapter card) bootable?

 

[Maxxify]

If the board can boot from NVMe it should be fine. Older boards sometimes had issues but many had BIOS updates or other workarounds, but if it boots already it should support it. Via UEFI if nothing else.