Hardware & Technical M.2 NVMe SSD in Win 7 system - all sorted thanks

Para Handy

Para Handy
Shadowdancer said:
Not that it matters all that much for consumer workloads. The big step is replacing spinning rust with any moderately fast SSD, NVMe is nice but not vastly important outside benchmarks, and the big selling point there would be leaving the first SATA port available. Even an HDD killer like updating Elite leaves my cheap SATA WD Blue rather bored. (Filling my 16GB RAM with cooked assets from my NVMe stick would take around 5 seconds, versus 30-ish from the SATA unit… I think I'd live even through that harsh scenario :D )
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Morbad said:
In most practical use, I have difficulty distinguishing from a third gen, eight year old, SATA II SSD that lacks NCQ and a modern PCI-E 4x NVMe SSD than benches ten times faster. There are certainly a few exceptions, but in general, diminishing returns kick in pretty quickly as soon as you leave the limitations of mechanical drives behind.
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Quite correct of course.

I already decided to fit a 1TB SSD (I have 465GB and 232GB SSDs in place already) but since I saw NVMe had come down in price I figured I would treat myself to an early birthday present and it is an excuse to catch-up on tech. (I was originally an electronics engineer but out of the field a long time.)
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
cmdr milesred said:
Not too sure what you mean, but what I can see in the image is that site seems to have neglected the decimal, 540/680 is quite good for that drive. you can almost double that by putting 2 together in raid stripe mode. again, quite good.
If you are believing what I see in the image that it thinks the speed is 6804/5403... all I can say is that there is no way that speed is possible for that drive. I do have no problem believing though that their mb/s refers to megabits per second, in which case then the numbers are actually much more in line with expected values of that drive with windows already installed on it and has been used for a short while.
And then yes, you can expect the M2 drive to be quite a bit faster than that.
From my own experiences with M2 drives, I would have no problem at all in believing the numbers listed in the specs for that device on the Samsung site.
FWIW, try something like crystaldisk or atto bench...see what they tell you about your 850..I wouldn't put much faith in any web site anyway for a hd test, and even less trust for one that's not going to indicate megabytes per sec or megabits per sec...
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Your deductions seem relevant.

However, the test in the image is not an HD test on an WEB site but the "Samsung Magician" software installed directly on my disk. :)

It is very likely that it is an omission of decimal.

https://imgur.com/a/U9wxnvM
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
Para Handy said:
The reason your figures are so low compared to the quote you use is probably that you are running the M.2 SSD in SATA mode (or maybe it is only capable of SATA).

The higher figures in your quote are the transfer rates for SSD in M.2 using NVMe - which uses the PCI bus to access the SSD memory and does not use SATA.

You should check your SSD to see if it is NVMe capable and if so, sort out your BIOS to enable the use of that for M.2 socket (if it is a type "M" socket).
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I do not use M.2

I was talking about M.2 of your 970 on the Amazon.

My SSD is a classic SSD on a SATA port.
 

Para Handy

Para Handy
All sorted - easy W7 hotfix

OK just to wrap this up:

My SSD arrived and went in, initialised, cloned C:\ to it, system running from it - less than an hour.

W7 recognised the NMVe SSD immediately after I installed it and switched on the PC. This was due to previously applying the hotfix that you get from clicking the link at the top of the page https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...er-support-in-nvm-express-in-windows-7-and-wi - agree the thing on the next page and then supply an email address - they email a link to download the hotfix 477475_intl_x64_zip.exe (a self -extracting zip) - just clicking open on the resulting msu file installed the NVMe driver. Maybe be a problem if doing a W7 OS install but for my purposes that was all I had to do, not the convoluted rigmarole on the KB page (above).

So cloning the C: drive took less than half an hour (370GB) after initialising and formatting the SSD. Reboot (changing boot order in BIOS) and hey presto, new SSD is now drive C:\ (booted fine) and the old C drive had been renamed as V drive.

Double check that all works fine, do a performance run (5 min - result below) - all done and dusted.

So anyone running W7 who wants to fit a NVMe SSD - just check your socket is type "M", ensure the BIOS can accommodate the x4 speed on it (update bios if needed) and you should have no issues. I was pleasantly surprised.

Thanks to everyone that took the time to post. [up]


991kdcW.jpg



P.S. I had made an image of the old C drive in case of issues, I recommend anyone else to do this too.

[cool]
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
cmdr milesred said:
FWIW, try something like crystaldisk or atto bench...see what they tell you about your 850..I wouldn't put much faith in any web site anyway for a hd test, and even less trust for one that's not going to indicate megabytes per sec or megabits per sec...
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I tested with Crystal Disk, and it seems that with the "Rapid Mode" of Samsung the results are "confirmed" in sequential.

These are Megabytes and not Megabits in Crystal Disk

https://imgur.com/a/d1EUPtL
 
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Para Handy

Para Handy
Patrick_68000 said:
I tested with Crystal Disk, and it seems that with the "Rapid Mode" of Samsung the results are "confirmed" in sequential.

These are Megabytes and not Megabits in Crystal Disk

https://imgur.com/a/d1EUPtL
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I have just revisited your pics. I had completely misread the one in French, sorry about that.

Now - How on earth did you get a SATA-connected SSD to outperform a NVMe-connected one running at PCIex4?

I know you said "rapid mode" and that it is an 850 PRO but that rapid mode on a SATA connection looks insanely fast.

So excuse me if it is something everyone else knows but it has piqued my interest.

EDIT - the same test on my 970 EVO NMVe SSD:

nQrWCnh.jpg
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
Para Handy said:
I have just revisited your pics. I had completely misread the one in French, sorry about that.

Now - How on earth did you get a SATA-connected SSD to outperform a NVMe-connected one running at PCIex4?

I know you said "rapid mode" and that it is an 850 PRO but that rapid mode on a SATA connection looks insanely fast.

So excuse me if it is something everyone else knows but it has piqued my interest.

EDIT - the same test on my 970 EVO NMVe SSD:

Click to expand...

Here the explanations ;)

https://www.windowscentral.com/samsung-ssd-rapid-mode

There are also a lot of links on Google and videos about the "Rapid Mode"
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
Morbad said:
"Rapid Mode" is a software cache in system memory.

CrystalDiskMark's default tests likely fit entirely within the cache so it's testing the RAM not the SSD.
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Yes it's like the RAMDISK under our good old MS-DOS ;)

However on my SSD 850 Pro, the performances are excellent in my daily use and I never had problems.

:)
 
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Dural

Dural
I just did this too. Moved Win 7 onto an NVMe stick using the hotfix and migrate the OS method in order to make a bit of space to shift more stuff off mechanical storage to the growing collection of SSDs I'm using. Not including backing up the OS partition beforehand, it took about 1/2 hour.

Surprisingly, given how fast SATA SSDs are anyway, the OS is noticeably more responsive running from an NVMe device.

News on the street is next year we should see a fairly significant drop in cost for these things too which is nice.
 
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