Specifically Which model m.2 ship with precision 7000 series?

I'll give that a look. Thanks

 

I'm in UEFI mode.

I went ahead and created a USB recovery disk, backed up the M.2 SSDs to an external USB drive (using the Windows 7 backup that is still available in Windows 10), went in to the BIOS to put the two drives in to RAID-0, which appears to have destroyed the contents of the drives. I then booted off the USB recovery disk, and restored my data from the external USB drive, and fiddled a bit to get the files that used to be on the second M.2 in to the "right" folders on the single RAID-0 volume. Everything appears to work fine, and I haven't had a BSOD in more than a day, which is "unusual" as they were occurring regularly pretty much every 24hrs exactly.

New speeds (though it doesn't really feel faster, nor am I getting anywhere near the 18sec boot-up that Bokeh is reporting):

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1836.524 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1552.563 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 178.313 MB/s [ 43533.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 231.238 MB/s [ 56454.6 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1570.224 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1263.050 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 20.631 MB/s [ 5036.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 53.465 MB/s [ 13053.0 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 60.8% (1149.6/1892.0 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/02/27 14:51:32
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14271] (x64)

 

That is great Manbir. I'll try using Windows backup and recovery and compare with using Clonezilla. I may like using windows backup better. Thanks


Edit: I've now switched to using Windows Backup and Recovery to make my drive images and folder backups. It works great and is free.

 

I finally got around to testing the speeds of my two OEM drives

First up is the system drive. SM951 512 GB

first test using CystalDiskMark:


I was very happy of course, but I wanted to see if that 422.7 MB/s could be improved. So I booted into safe mode and tried again:


that was worse. So I ran a full test again of the SM951 512 in safe mode:




Next up is my data drive, the PM951 1TB. I wasn't sure what to expect.


Very pleased with these numbers of both the SM951 512GB and PM951 1TB.

These are OEM from DELL without me messing with any reinstall of OS or re-imaging or anything like that. BIOS set to RAID (not AHCI) with Dell installed Win10Pro64 from the factory. Microsoft drivers. No RAID 0 or anything fancy, just individual drive performance.

There you have it. Thus concludes my quest to find out about the various OEM PCIe NVMe M.2 SSDs that are sold with the precision.

Thank you. The end

 

SM961 announced. So high perf and 1TB might be coming closer

http://www.itmedia.co.jp/pcuser/articles/1602/25/news114.html