Dell's R4 Toshiba XG3 M.2 NVMe SSD, one of the best?

So I finally got hold of a Alienware 17 R4 with top specs. One problem, it doesn't work. Has a black screen problem, but that is another story.

The R4 has a 1TB 2.5 7200rpm HD and a 1TB Toshiba XG3 M.2 NVMe SSD. The brief time I had the laptop working I noticed the SSD was slower than my old 2.5" Samsung 840 Evo, via windows start up and transferring large files to it. So I checked out reviews of the Toshiba SSD thinking it was trash (also read that in a thread here), but apparently it is one of the best on the market according to this review:

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ngff-m-2/toshiba-xg3-m-2-nvme-ssd-review-1tb/

I noted it recommends:

"Of note however, best performance is reached by finding the XG3 within the PC Control Panel/Device Manager/Disk Drives/ and turning off Windows write cache buffer flushing under the ‘Properties’ menu of the XG3. If you don’t do this, you will experience very low write performance".

Can anyone confirm this is true?

Maybe that is why some people have said it is rubbish.

I can't check it myself until they replace the motherboard, and apparently there are only 3 left in the country before they run out, if they are already allocated I'll have to wait until more are delivered.

Of course another explanation for the slow speed would be they put the OS on the 2.5" 7200rpm HD, which I'm hoping is not the case as that would make no sense at all.

 

is your drive in raid or ahci mode? my 2TB 960 pro only managed 2.8k mb/s on ahci and reached 3.2k mb/s on raid

 

Are you sure those speeds are correct? Those speeds are the equivalent of a USB 1.0/2.0 memory stick.

 

missed a k after

 

When someone states that toshiba is the best m.2 and it beats Samsung you know something is wrong.

 

Speeds I'm getting with my Toshiba XGA3 which came with the laptop are:

Read: 1607 MB/s
Write: 521 MB/s

It came with a NVMe RAID controller driver and in BIOS it's in RAID configuration. Although the SATA 1TB and XGA3 aren't in RAID (afaik).

The XGA3 speeds are pretty poor for a NvMe
PCIe SSD. I'm pretty sure it can go faster than this, but not sure what needs to be done.

I did turn of Windows write cache buffer flushing, and that did increase the performance.

Anyone know if it is possible to increase read/write speeds on this drive. Reviews say it should be faster than this, especially the write speed.

 

Yep, take it out and insert a Samsung 960!

 

Don't waste money on a "performance/premium" SSD. Snake oil to the normal or even most Power users. Absolutely no difference in games, system performance, or productivity software over standard SSD's (and yess I have owned performance Samsung drives).

Constantly moving very large files, or encoding lots of videos, then its an ok investment.

Do get rid of your spinning disks though

 

Want to try any of this? https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkP...needs-better-NVMe-driver-support/td-p/3518940

 

Ok lets put it this way... for the price Dell Alienware charges for the M.2. PCIe NVMe SSD you would expect it to compete with the 960 Pro (yes PRO not EVO.) it isnt about being better in games. When i bought my Alienware 17 R4 i couldn't buy it without the 512gb SSD. THAT is the point. Also i would keep the spinning hard drive... think it as a reliable mass storage that you dump anything and everything in. (i switched mine out with a samsung 2tb) but yeah


OR better yet keep the spinning and get the intel thingy.... that should help right?

 

Toshiba NVMe ssd's boiling to death in the Alienware's. What a waste of money!! @Vasudev @iunlock

 

One of the rarest occurrences: a new SSD dying in a couple of months due to overheat.

 

Dellianware customer support: our NVMe don't boil my good sir, it's get hot because it's dam sexy.

 

I also have a Toshiba drive the XG3 I get a Model NVMe THNSN5256GPUK NV

On crystal disk Mark with a 1gb size on a 5 run pass I get 1766/488 It's just stupid! I used to get a better write speed form my cruical MX200 drives

What M.2 and also what SSD should I get?
I generall have my system laid out like this.

Drive 1: OS, Office, drivers
Drive 2: Steam and Origin
Drive 3: Storage films and OneDrive etc etc

 

Samsung 950 pro or 960 EVO/Pro.

 

Hey op, my toshiba was hitting throttling temps, so dell sent me a new samsung sm961 (or pm961 i cant remember), but it's way faster and runs much cooler. Use your warranty!

 

I have ordered an 850evo SSD for storage and also a 2x 960evo for my OS and games.

Job done!

 

Hi namaiki. I have come across this method in another post and tried to update it to the OCZ 400 storage controller driver. However when I restart the laptop I find that it still has the microsoft driver installed, but it then has a third driver present (the one I tried to install) with an exclamation mark on it citing a code 31 error. Regardless of if I try the RD400 or XGA3 option. If I try to update this driver (with error), it turns into another microsoft driver. This means I then have two exact same microsoft storage drivers present, plus the raid driver.

So basically it doesn't work. Not sure how those guys managed to get the driver to replace the microsoft one. But I tried the exact same method and it is a no go.

The odd thing I noticed is the microsoft driver doesn't have an uninstall option like the other drivers.