Dell Latitude (Skylake) incompatible with popular SSDs?

Seems to me that the OP is still not willing to accept that lemons happen, blaming it on BIOS or a "power issue". If it was a BIOS issue, we would've have noticed it with our initial deployment. Power delivery issue typically happens when the drive is trying to draw more power than rated, not the other way around.

Lemons happen, but don't go around telling people that products have a fundamental design issue when you get a lemon, and when its fixed, don't try to scapegoat it on something unrelated.

 

A bad connector can create the power issue and it could well be that some drives are more sensitive than others to such power constraints.

John

 

@John Ratsey @Krowe I totally accept that lemons may exist and I may have had one of them. However, trying to explain that to support over the phone is incredibly difficult when they follow a script and assign blame to third parties, e.g. drive manufacturers. Their position being that if the original drive can boot everything is fine. So defining a lemon is subjective and depends on the criteria being applied. I think its plausible that many non-business customers may have had similar problems but been told by Dell that it's an incompatibility issue; so they simply give up and just use the pre-installed drive.

 

1.5.0, although now that I see 1.7.3 is out I will be using that.

 

Has anyone with an e5470 and 3rd party SSD tested their DPC latency with latencymon? When using the included hard drive I have no DPC latency issues but when using a 2tb Samsung 850 pro or a crucial mx300 2tb ssd I have very bad DPC latency coming from acpi.sys. Also the screen becomes very hard to look at, seems the refresh rate changes and I get a headache after a couple minutes. No problem with screen when hdd is installed. I ordered a new sata connector, hoping that fixes it. Dell support is beyond useless, any help would be great- thanks

 

Is the storage access mode RAID or AHCI? It would be worthwhile trying the other setting in the BIOS but you will need to follow some steps (Google will help) to stop a BSOD in Windows after the switchover in the BIOS.

John

 

I've tried both SATA modes with a fresh install of win10 both times and same issue unfortunately

 

Thanks. The Samsung SSD will work best with the Samsung NVMe driver. Do both the SSDs you are trying have at least 20% free space? SSDs don't like being near to full as it messes up the garbage management.

Otherwise, have you looked in Task Manager to check the CPU utilization. Maybe something is hammering the system which could make everything laggy.

I've just been running LatencyMon on both an E7450 (Samsung 840 EVO SSD) and a Precision 5510 (Sandisk X400 SSD). After about 10 minutes the E7450 showed ACPI.sys as a problem but there was no other obvious problem.

You might want to try disabling devices in Device Manager to see if that can identify the culprit. Do you have a WWAN card?

John

 

The Samsung 850 Pro is SATA so the nvme driver won't work right?
Both SSDs have fresh installs of win10 and are pretty much empty, I updated drivers then installed latencymon straight away (no other apps even antivirus). Nothing jumps out in task manager.
I put the factory hard drive back in and now the screen is looking weird and DPC latency is persistent. Previously using the HDD the system was fine. I've ordered a new SATA cable, I hope that's the problem. I called Dell support and got the same response as OP. The frustration in dealing with them just isn't worth for an even moderately technically person unless there is some very obvious defect. I have a warranty but they refuse to send a tech out, they are real crooks.
I have a DW1560 wireless card, but that's WLAN not WAN right? I also tried disabling wireless and LAN in bios as I know that's a common DPC latency interrupt trigger and audio glitches are worse when web browsing but the problem is persistent even with no networking enabled.
Do dell laptops have a history of DPC latency issues? I'm doing low latency high resolution digital audio production so this is key...
Thanks for the help

 

Apologies - I had mis-read the 950 Pro as 950 Pro.

An internet search does not reveal widespread latency issues with Dell notebooks. Unless there is something where Dell support can identify which part to change then they aren't able to send a technician whose job is to change such parts as determined by the technical support people. This, unfortunately, leaves you to do the research. Things I would try include (i) removing the Dell WLAN card (all my experience is with the Intel cards) and (ii) disabling just about everything in the BIOS. I share your suspicion that the BIOS is periodically searching for something. Does your 5470 include Thunderbolt or a dGPU?

John