PM951 - SATA or AHCI

17 R3 with the factory 1 TB PM951

My performance tests run about half of what I see people post with their system configured as AHCI. Is there any way to do this without have to reinstall Winders? I really don't want to go through that - I'm a Server Engineer by day and when I get home the last thing I want to do is tinker with Winders. Other than faster test results is real world performance any different? Are there any other benefits?






Results fluctuate and sometimes the Read will go up to 14xx in Samsung Magician. On the topic of Magician - it sure would be nice if all of its features were available for PM951 owners.

I did try the following
1) Change to AHCI
2) Boot in Safe Mode
3) Install Samsung NVMe driver
4) Reboot - here is where I encounter issues... Windows will not reboot at all; it will only do a cold boot so I'll have to hold down the power button and then power it back up. My boot times were <20 seconds and are now > 2 minutes. I reverted back to RAID mode and my boot / reboot times have improved but are not what they used to be before tinkering with things.

 

Hi, I'm sure you've seen this but just in case you haven't - http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...up-your-samsung-950-pro-m-2-ssd-17-r3.787205/

Much of the information in there will be useful to you but off the top of my head, your 2 minute boot times after setting to AHCI could be down to the "Legacy Rom Option" being enabled. @iunlock had a very similar issue that was resolved by de-selecting this option.

Looking at your numbers, your PM951 looks to score around what mine does (I have both the PM951 and the faster SM951) so I don't think your drive is being particularly hindered. That said, I'm sure other could chime in who have done significantly more testing than I have!

Samsung Magician is practically useless, I really wouldn't bother with it. Plus, it won't work with anything other than a retail drive so that rules out the PM/SM series and other client drives.

EDIT: Oh and your reboot issue could very well be your bios version and nothing to do with your drives. This has been a reported issue with BIOS version 1.2.7 and I believe 1.2.8. I'm not sure if the latest version 1.2.12 has this bug. I also had the reboot issue and resolved it by rolling back to BIOS ver 1.2.2.

You won't find older BIOS versions on the Dell support page for your machine but I found a link that is basically their FTP. I'll post it here in a second.....

Here you go - http://downloads.dell.com/published/pages/alienware-15-r2.html

PS: the AW15 R2 and the AW17 R3 share the same motherboard and BIOS updates.