Samsung SM961 NVMe M.2 SSD

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

As you can see, it is marked 2016 12. Apparently that means
December, good thing. Love the way the Mudder heatsinks fit.

Trying to clone my current installation, having some
technical difficulties. I would like to do the clone, to
measure reboot time given all of the stuff that is installed.

John Doe wrote:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

As you can see, it is marked 2016 12. Apparently that means
December, good thing. Love the way the Mudder heatsinks fit.

Trying to clone my current installation, having some
technical difficulties. I would like to do the clone, to
measure reboot time given all of the stuff that is installed.


You probably won't be able to clone, until the driver
situation is resolved.

Did it show up in Device Manager ?

Anything need to be done in the BIOS ?

Does the motherboard user manual have a section on NVMe ?

"If there is enough driver to see it, you should be able to clone."

Paul

Paul wrote:

John Doe wrote:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

As you can see, it is marked 2016 12. Apparently that
means December, good thing. Love the way the Mudder
heatsinks fit.

I should have oriented them the same, but at least they were
placed (like a machine) without any fiddling. Probably makes
no difference since they are meant to be run without any
heatsinks at all.

Trying to clone my current installation, having some
technical difficulties. I would like to do the clone, to
measure reboot time given all of the stuff that is
installed.

You probably won't be able to clone, until the driver
situation is resolved.

Did it show up in Device Manager ?

Yes, no problem. It shows in disk management too. Seems to be
workable like an SSD.

Anything need to be done in the BIOS ?

For NVMe, it has two informational entries only, size and
something else.

For booting, it seems to be workable like other drives.

Does the motherboard user manual have a section on NVMe ?

"If there is enough driver to see it, you should be able to
clone."

I have been trying to figure it out. Lots of experimentation.
Plus doing the same thing over and over again...

Nothing is difficult, otherwise. Windows 10 does install to
it.

While copying a 13 GB file intra-disk, it sustains between
600 and 700 MB per second...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/

Copying from the NVMe to a RAM drive should be very quick.

Paul wrote:

Does the motherboard user manual have a section on NVMe ?

No. I did a lot of reading on the Internet, while waiting for
the thing.

John Doe wrote:


Copying from the NVMe to a RAM drive should be very quick.

I think you would be shocked, if the RAM disk was the limiting factor.

The fastest RAMDisk I've had running here, was a 7GB/sec RAMDisk
using a 32-bit OS (where the RAM is in PAE space for fast mapping).
I've tried a couple times to reproduce that experiment and have
failed. So I don't have any pictures. Most of the time, the
best I can do otherwise, without a lot of work, is 4GB/sec.

The fastest NVMe setup I've seen on the web so far, is this one.
5.9GB/sec.

http://barefeats.com/hard210.html

Paul

Paul wrote:

John Doe wrote:

Copying from the NVMe to a RAM drive should be very quick.

I think you would be shocked, if the RAM disk was the
limiting factor.

Copying a 3GB file looks like it was 800-850MB/sec. I do not
have enough RAM to copy a large enough file to tell for sure.

Looks like it might be six times faster than my Intel 520
SSD.

Considering the intra-disk speed, I probably will use a
folder or a partition for temporary storage and manipulation
of files.

Have not bothered installing Samsung's driver, yet.

The fastest RAMDisk I've had running here, was a 7GB/sec
RAMDisk using a 32-bit OS (where the RAM is in PAE space
for fast mapping). I've tried a couple times to reproduce
that experiment and have failed. So I don't have any
pictures. Most of the time, the best I can do otherwise,
without a lot of work, is 4GB/sec.

The fastest NVMe setup I've seen on the web so far, is this
one. 5.9GB/sec.

http://barefeats.com/hard210.html

If you can afford it. Spending $155 for the drive was more
than enough for my $75 motherboard and $50 CPU.

CDM and AS benchmarks after installing Samsung's storage
driver (I guess it helps)...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

John Doe wrote:
CDM and AS benchmarks after installing Samsung's storage
driver (I guess it helps)...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

Does the NVMe device show up in perfmon.msc ?

In the perfmon graph setting, 20000 is 200MB/sec max. so
4000MB/sec max would be 20 times as much or 400000.

It would be interesting to compare the peaks in perfmon,
to the claim of 3336MB/sec on reads.

The lanes themselves are 4*985 = 3940MB/sec.

The 3336MB/sec number is coming too close to the
physical limit. There should be an "Intel buffer" penalty
in there somewhere. The buffers on Intel PCI Express hubs
are normally not big enough to run the links at 3940. It
has to be somewhat less, in a real transfer. (PCI Express
is packetized, and the packet size limit is determined by
the buffer space available.)

The 2254MB/sec number on the left is a bit more believable,
because it's not bumping into the PHY limit.

In the Mac result, with four of those drives, they got 5900,
which is probably out of 8000 (could be a Rev.2 slot, and
the adapter they were using had a switch chip on it). And
getting 75% of a link rate sounds "comfortable".

I would take a look around for similar CrystalDiskMark
results, just to see what others are getting.

This is the kind of benchmark you'd want to observe
on an oscilloscope.

Paul

Paul wrote:

John Doe wrote:

CDM and AS benchmarks after installing Samsung's storage
driver (I guess it helps)...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

Does the NVMe device show up in perfmon.msc ?

Yes, it shows in Performance Monitor.

In the perfmon graph setting, 20000 is 200MB/sec max. so
4000MB/sec max would be 20 times as much or 400000.

Disk read bytes per second? It shows in x1 values only.

I have been using system monitor since Windows 3.1 but not
sure how to make it work for this. I deleted my MSC files a
few months ago. None of the current stock Windows performance
monitors minimize very well for use as always-on-top display.

Added just another intra-disk transfer pic. I would think the
write speed is limiting the read speed during the transfer.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/?

It would be interesting to compare the peaks in perfmon,
to the claim of 3336MB/sec on reads.

FWIW... Read speed is about "5.5Gbs" when doing a backup with
Macrium Reflect.

Amazing how small the chips are for holding 256GB.

Who needs RAM...

The lanes themselves are 4*985 = 3940MB/sec.

The 3336MB/sec number is coming too close to the physical
limit. There should be an "Intel buffer" penalty in there
somewhere. The buffers on Intel PCI Express hubs are
normally not big enough to run the links at 3940. It has to
be somewhat less, in a real transfer. (PCI Express is
packetized, and the packet size limit is determined by the
buffer space available.)

The 2254MB/sec number on the left is a bit more believable,
because it's not bumping into the PHY limit.

In the Mac result, with four of those drives, they got
5900, which is probably out of 8000 (could be a Rev.2 slot,
and the adapter they were using had a switch chip on it).
And getting 75% of a link rate sounds "comfortable".

I would take a look around for similar CrystalDiskMark
results, just to see what others are getting.

I did a lot of looking. It is about the same as the others.










This is the kind of benchmark you'd want to observe on an
oscilloscope.

Paul

I will be happy to run any test that I can download or easily
implement.