SSD - poor 4K write

[mikewinddale]

So I just received my new Lenovo E570 laptop in the mail yesterday. It includes a Toshiba XG4 (M.2 NVMe SSD) (model number THNSF5256GPUK; see https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/info/docget.jsp?did=55015). For daily usage, everything seems perfect. Bootup takes only a few seconds.

But running some benchmarks, I'm getting some very odd results, especially on 4K write.

I installed a secondary Kingston KC400 (SATA SSD) as personal storage and I'm running benchmarks to compare the Toshiba XG4 (M.2 NVME SSD) bootable OS drive against the Kingston KC400 (SATA SSD) personal storage.

As expected, the Toshiba outperforms the Kingston on most sequential tasks, because the M.2 interface is much faster than SATA. With random reads and writes, the two drives are more competitive, because the interface itself is no longer the bottleck. With random tasks, sometimes the Toshiba is faster, and sometimes the Kingston is faster.

But it's with 4K writes that something really bizarre is happening. With 4K write, the Toshiba is about 5 to 10 times faster than a mechanical HDD (Hitachi HDD on my old Lenovo E545), but the Kingston is about 20 to 40 times faster than the Toshiba.

I am attaching some screenshots of benchmarks. "HGST" is the Hitachi HDD in the old Lenovo E545, "THN" is the Toshiba SSD in the new Lenovo E570, and "Kingston" is the Kingston SSD in the new Lenovo E570.

I've looked on Toshiba's website to see if they have any utilities or firmware updates for the XG4. I can't find anything.

Benchmarks at http://imgur.com/a/tIgUC

Thanks

As I said, the laptop is perfectly functional for non-benchmarking daily use. Bootup (off the Toshiba) takes 5 seconds, and there's never any hanging or any hourglasses.

* Update: I discovered that if I disable write-caching on the Kingston, its 4K write benchmarks drop to the same level as the Toshiba's. But whether I enable or disable write-caching on the Toshiba makes no difference to its speed. I plan on keeping write-caching disabled for reliability purposes, so I guess in the end, the two drives will both be the same speed. It's strange that the Toshiba's speed is always as if it has write-caching disabled regardless, while the Kingston's varies, but so be it, I guess?

 

[madmatt30]

http://superuser.com/questions/1107759/slow-ssd-performance-toshiba-1gb-nvme

 

[mikewinddale]

http://superuser.com/questions/1107759/slow-ssd-performance-toshiba-1gb-nvme

Thanks!!! Looks like this person is having the exact same problem! And their solution is what I expected - updated drivers. Unfortunately, I can't find any newer drivers for anything. Toshiba's website barely records the existence of this drive, and there isn't any software or firmware for it, so my system is using the default Windows 10 NVMe driver. Not sure what there is left to update, then.

In the meantime, I installed the latest BIOS update, which is less than a month old. Didn't help.

 

[madmatt30]

http://superuser.com/questions/1107759/slow-ssd-performance-toshiba-1gb-nvme

Thanks!!! Looks like this person is having the exact same problem! And their solution is what I expected - updated drivers. Unfortunately, I can't find any newer drivers for anything. Toshiba's website barely records the existence of this drive, and there isn't any software or firmware for it, so my system is using the default Windows NVMe driver. Not sure what there is left to update, then.

In the meantime, I installed the latest BIOS update, which is less than a month old. Didn't help.

check your rst drivers are upto date,now on 15.2

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/55005/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-
otherwise yep youre kind of stuck mate,
these are currently oem drives only as far as I see so finding anything releavant is going to be sketchy at best.

I did find this little titbit of info (its regarding the xg3 but should be the same)

It is worth mentioning that, unlike the Samsung 950 Pro NVMe SSD, the XG3 does not require any special drivers and works perfectly with Win 10 integrated NVMe drivers. Of note however, best performance is reached by finding the XG3 within the PC Control Panel/Device Manager/Disk Drives/ and turning off Windows write cache buffer flushing under the ‘Properties’ menu of the XG3. If you don’t do this, you will experience very low write performance

 

[mikewinddale]

check your rst drivers are upto date,now on 15.2

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/55005/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-

I did find this little titbit of info (its regarding the xg3 but should be the same)

turning off Windows write cache buffer flushing under the ‘Properties’ menu of the XG3. If you don’t do this, you will experience very low write performance

How would I tell whether Intel RST drivers will work for me? Looking at Sisoft SANDRA and HWiNFO64, my mainboard chipset and my disk controller are both "Lenovo". In other words, I have no idea who makes my laptop's chipset.

As for write caching, I have those turned off already.

Thanks again.

Sigh.

 

[mikewinddale]

Okay, I checked Lenovo's driver support page, and it had the Intel RST drivers there. So I installed the latest version.

Didn't help. But maybe the next version will. At least I know that I should check the Intel RST drivers periodically. If the last version of Intel RST fixed someone else's Toshiba XG3, maybe the next version will fix my XG4.

Thanks again.

 

[mikewinddale]

Now this is interesting: I discovered that if I disable write-caching on the Kingston, its 4K write benchmarks drop to the same level as the Toshiba's. But whether I enable or disable write-caching on the Toshiba makes no difference to its speed. So it's as if the Toshiba is always acting like write-caching is disabled.

I plan on keeping write-caching disabled for reliability purposes, so I guess in the end, the two drives will both be the same speed. It's strange that the Toshiba's speed is always as if it has write-caching disabled regardless, while the Kingston's varies, but so be it, I guess?

 

[mikewinddale]

Hey, madmatt30, I want to thank you for helping me think through this issue. I finally found a solution, if you want to take a look: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3277929/microsoft-nvme-drivers-poor-random-write-performance-purchase-nvme-drives-proprietary-drivers.html

It turns out that the Intel RST drivers are only for AHCI SATA, so that's why updating those didn't help. But I was indeed having a driver issue: with the Microsoft NVMe PCIe drivers. But since Toshiba doesn't release any NVMe drivers, I had to use drivers from Toshiba's subsidiary, OCZ. They work better for my Toshiba drive than Microsoft's drivers do.