15 R2 SSD confusion

Hey guys,

New 15R2 owner here. I bought a relatively base model edition with the i7-6700, 970m, 8gb ram, and 1tb spinner but the screen came with dead pixels. Dell did an exchange and are sending me the same one but now an added 16gb ram and 256gb PM951 solid state drive. I can't seem to find much on this drive and I already bought a 500gb 850 m.2 evo SATA3 SSD I planned on using. Which SSD is better? Trying to decide if I should return the evo

 

keep them both man, you have slots for 2 ssds in the 15 and free upgrades are free!

 

I get that, but I don't really need that much SSD space since I'll be using that spinner for all my data. SSD will just have programs and OS

 

The pm951 is great drive. Use it for OS and the 850evo for game and data installs

 

I use a SATA3 drive for Windows, another SATA3 for Storage and a 950 for Games. Really I can't tell much difference in load times between them unless I run a benchmark.

 

niiice a 950 Pro m.2 SSD from samsung, thats a bargain !

 

if anyone's curious the PM951 benchmarks at around 759 mbps random and the 850 evo m.2 sata runs at around 450mbps. But i didnt detect any performance differences so keeping the 500gb 850 evo instead

 

I'm curious about something -

The laptop I've bought is shipping with a 512GB SSD which I assume is the PM951?

If had that in the main slot at x4 what would be the max speed I can get out of a drive in the secondary slot with 2 lanes?

Would it be worth putting another fast drive in there such as the 950 Pro or even another PM/SM951 or are you better off with the 850 EVO m.2?

Essentially how much lower is the performance in the secondary m.2 slot with only 2 lanes?

 

X2 for me topped out at around 700-800MB per second. However, this is going off my desktop performance (the M.2 slot was limited to X2).

Just last night I put my PM951 in the second slot but I only very quickly benched my SM951 in slot 1 (around 2300MB per second).

When I get home tonight I'll bench the PM951 and post a screenshot.

 

I have the pm951 in slot 1 running pcie and the m.2 evo 500 on sata in slot 2. My reads are great but writes benchmark at 180mb/sec even though when I actually copy files to it, from one of my sata ssds if does max out 500mb/sec or so.. I don't know why these pm951 benchmark such low write speeds

 

Awesome thanks!

I know the PM951 512GB comes in at around 1700MB/s in the x4 slot (I had one in my XPS 15).

Will be interesting to see how much slower it is in an x2 slot.

 

Ok, sorry for the delay. Here are my benches for both my SM951 in slot 1 and the PM951 in slot 2.



To note: I have the Samsung NVMe driver installed, ver 1.1

 

Nice thanks for checking that. It seems the speeds in that second slot does actually warrant a faster drive than the 850 EVO m.2, maybe another PM/SM951.

Mine should be delivered tomorrow excited now !

 

No problem