Samsung 960 Pro: Not giving full performance; need repair for Win 10 part of dual-boot

[BonzaiDuck]

This is an update to my initial post about cloning to a 960 Pro drive. That follows below and in the second post I made.

Basically, summing up the original post (wordy, as I said -- follows) -- I chose to use EaseUS Partition Master/Manager Pro within my SATA SSD Windows installation after making sure to socket everything properly and configure the BIOS. I left 100GB on the 1TB for OP, even though we assume it isn't much needed. EaseUS offered and "optimize for SSD" checkbox, and I selected it. What it did -- I think -- was to move the GUID 300MB volume to sit between the Win 7 "system reserved" and the Win 7 "C :" volume. I had no idea it would do this.

I was relieved when it booted to Win 7 from the dual-boot menu just fine. As I said, it already had the Samsung driver installed -- v. 2.0. It had been installed when I experimented with the smallest EVO NVMe.

Then I ran magician. For the benchmark, it reported only about ~2,015 to ~2,040 MB/s seq-read and between ~1,500 and ~1,650 MB/s for seq-write. Anvil results varied little from that . I know darn well that this drive is supposed to perform at ~3,500 and ~2,200 MB/s. Even the EVO drive I used in my caching experiment (all caching was disabled and deleted before my clone) performed at its spec.

I've updated the driver to 2.1; I did whatever I could to tweak my BIOS (e.g., changing PCIE "generation" from auto to 3).

There's no problem with heat; I installed the Pro drive with the KryoM.2 card and heatsink.

I tried the drive in two different PCIE slots -- first the second x16 slot used for SLI [x8/x8]. Then, in the x4 slot at the bottom of the board where I'd originally installed the EVO. No difference in benchmarks.

That's a problem of concern.

The second trouble was that the clone to the M.2 Pro borked my Win 10 boot installation. I had misgivings about this from Samsung's info for using their migration tool.

I'm good to go for even temporary recovery while I sort this out: The original SATA SSD dual-boot-system disk is intact, and should be bootable after removing the NVMe M.2.

I'm also wondering if there is maybe an alignment problem with this. Does anyone have any idea why the drive is performing below spec? I'm hoping it isn't the drive itself, or I'll have to secure-erase it and RMA. I can't remember, but I thought it came directly from Amazon.

Any ideas?



the original post follows below, but if you're on board with the above, you can probably skip it.



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I have a dual-boot OS installation on the same physical SSD.

The drive contains the four volumes you would expect: a 100 MB system-reserved, 300MB GUID, Win 7 OS_boot volume and a Win 10 OS boot volume. These latter two appear only as "C :" when booting into either OS, and have no drive label if they are the OS not in current use after boot time.

So the drive arrived with the morning mail, and I'm going to install it in an NVMe M.2 PCIE card with a heatsink -- the KryoM.2 PCIE and passive-sink AquaComputer product.

And I'm looking at the Samsung Data Migration cloning tool. There are "cautions" about more than one OS "installed on different drives C: and D:" It doesn't specify whether these are "physical disks" or logical volumes.

I also have EaseUS Partition Manager in latest version, which should allow me to clone the boot (source) disk with all volumes directly to the target within Windows, probably requiring an automated shutdown to disconnect the source disk.

If I were just cloning a 500 GB SATA SSD to a 1TB SATA SSD, I wouldn't have any hesitation or incentive to post here first.

The OS-boot ADATA SATA SSD has been backed up.

Does anyone have any insight as to how I should proceed with this? Would there be a problem using Partition Manager as I described? Do I HAVE to use the Samsung Data Migration tool? Are there any cautions, bad experiences to share?

I hope someone can offer even brief insight about this. I just don't want to go through any detours, panics or trouble with it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Additional info: I previously had the 960 EVO 250 in the system, and the Sammy NVMe driver is installed to both the Windows 7 and Windows 10 OS. A lot of folks had trouble with the driver problem for not having installed it to Win 7 in advance (or even installing the MS Native NVMe driver).

All that stuff is done. I can't find any enlightenment on the web, other than some people -- probably following my own choice of procedures - have no problem with cloning a system disk (although no mention of dual-boot). Others get fouled up starting from MBR source disks, wrong selections in BIOS, etc.

If nobody has anything to share now, I'm going forward to see if I can do this. Your insights, experience and advice still sought here.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had a Samsung SM951 (OEM 950?) MLC 128GB M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 SSD installed in each of my two ASRock Z170 Pro4S rigs. In Win7 64-bit, their 4K QD32 random scores were around half of what they were supposed to be, according to a YouTube video and the spec sheet. Couldn't quite figure it out.

When I upgraded to Win10, and then updated to 1607, somehow, in the interim, the SSD sped up, and worked properly.

Still using MSAHCI driver. (I have the AHCI version, not the NVMe version, mostly specifically so I wouldn't have driver issues clean installing Win7 64-bit in UEFI mode, which is already problematic getting the USB3.0 drivers on there.)

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I had a Samsung SM951 (OEM 950?) MLC 128GB M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 SSD installed in each of my two ASRock Z170 Pro4S rigs. In Win7 64-bit, their 4K QD32 random scores were around half of what they were supposed to be, according to a YouTube video and the spec sheet. Couldn't quite figure it out.

When I upgraded to Win10, and then updated to 1607, somehow, in the interim, the SSD sped up, and worked properly.

Still using MSAHCI driver. (I have the AHCI version, not the NVMe version, mostly specifically so I wouldn't have driver issues clean installing Win7 64-bit in UEFI mode, which is already problematic getting the USB3.0 drivers on there.)

Well, Bro, surprises just keep on comin'.

The problem is not the NVMe Pro. It isn't the KryoM.2 PCIE card. It isn't the selection of expansion slots. It wasn't my BIOS configuration.

I secure-erased the drive, in event that I might want to RMA it right away. Then, I reconnected the ADATA SATA SSD dual-boot system-drive.

I installed the newer 2.1 Samsung driver. Then, I initialized the drive in Win Disk Management. I put a 500GB simple volume on it, and re-ran Samsung Magician.

3,158 MB/s seq-read; 2,135 MB/s seq-write.

I used EaseUS Partition Manager Pro to clone the dual-boot ADATA to the NVMe when I started this, as would be apparent from reading my prolix posts.

It occurs to me now that I'd had an e-mail dialog with EaseUS tech-support back in October, when I was asking about the MBR-to-GPT conversion and getting my BIOS to configure to Windows UEFI boot mode.

When I mentioned the NVMe M.2 plans I had, I now remember the tech-support guy said that they "hadn't had much experience with the M.2 NVMe drives, and appreciated if I report developments to them." I couldn't report anything after that time, because I was only using the little EVO to experiment -- and you know all about that. My prolix thread and posts you'd remember.

I might have done better to use the Samsung Migration tool. But because of the tool's explanation on their web site -- suggesting I might not be able to boot from another OS correctly once the clone completed, I abjured using it.

The drive is fine; all my hardware is fine. But I'll either have to develop a different strategy for using it, or look around for an updated or new version of Acronis or Macrium -- whatever. I acquired EaseUS because it was the only SW that popped up in my search for "convert MBR to GPT" and you had to buy the software to get that feature.

And poking around in EaseUS Partition Manager, I couldn't find any "update" link. I think I would be eligible for one if they'd created a new revision.

So -- the chances that there was an alignment problem are higher in my empirical view after starting over with only the Secure Erase, the pre-installed driver, and Windows Disk Management to format the drive as a non-boot data disk.

After I'm finished with all this, I can imagine TBWs climbing to somewhere between 3 and 5. Drop in the bucket, but it could all have been avoided -- somehow.

EaseUS even provides a means of "moving OS volumes" to a new drive, rather than simply cloning. But rather than trust their software with NVMe issues, I gotta shop! Gotta find an alternative!

All the hardware? It's all wonderful. I'm just not gonna start from scratch to reinstall the dual-boot systems if I can avoid it. Just "getting" there was a trail of blood, sweat and tears -- between the ASUS slipstream solution for the USB3 driver, setting up all the updates and rollups, installing all the hardware drivers and software.

The fall back would be deletion of the Win10 OS and use of Samsung's Migration Tool or a more flexible alternative. The Win 10 configuration and software installs hadn't moved along as far as those for Win 7 -- which I still have a preference for using at this point.

But maybe there's a clone tool out there that will resolve this altogether. At least, with no RMA necessary, I can take my damn time.

UPDATE ON BENCHMARKS: Magician shows 3,158 / 2,135, which is "in the ballpark" and even on-spot for the write rate. Anvil gives the same results I had before. CrystalDiskMark shows 3,298 / 2,159. I put in a query with Acronis tech-support pertaining to their newest 2017 TI revision and "cloning dual boot."

I can't assume there's anything wrong with the drive with these benchmarks, even if just a tad short. And these were made with the board in the x4 PCIE slot -- not the second PCIE x16 @ x8. The x4 slot goes through the chipset and the DMI link to CPU.