SM951 as OS boot device information

A-Tuning shows that the ultra M.2 slot is populated but not what it is
Drive health only shows my two WD drives

HWiNFO is similar - sees the drive is there but only a small amount of info and no temperature or usage info.

Samsung Magician sees the drive but provides no info

I'll just have to hope that better support is available later.

Ronzer wrote: Thanks to this thread I was able to install 3 SM951 in RAID0 using UEFI RST as a Windows 10 boot drive in my Z170 OC Formula.  I had to unplug my BD drive from the MB to avoid Windows 10 crashing when I tried to install the RST driver during initial Windows install.  Then I had to disable CSM in the UEFI to enable me to format and use he drive during Windows install. The problem is now I'm not getting the sustained read performance performance I would expect from a 3 SM951 RAID0 setup. AS SSD shows: R:     990 MB/s W: 1,987 MB/s ATTO shows: R:  1,983 MB/s W: 2,356 MB/s Samsung Magician shows: R:  2,153 MB/s W: 2,550 MB/s These are all OK number but not great.  I'm running all the latest UEFI, drivers, etc.  I've played with the RST cache settings, no help. Something strange is that UEFI and RST shows all 3 drives in the RAID the the size of the drive is correct but HWiNFO64 only shows two drives connected. Suggestions?

First, are those AHCI SM951s, or NVMe? I'm guessing AHCI.

What version of the IRST driver are you using? Either the F6 driver or Windows IRST driver package?

Intel not long ago released IRST 14.6, that includes several highly important bug fixes I assume is in 14.5, although that is not clear in Intel's information. I'll let you read this yourself rather than me paraphrasing:

https://downloadmirror.intel.com/25165/eng/releasenotes_14_6.html

I literally sounds as if you are affected by at least one of the bugs in 14.5. I'm also concerned about the Option ROM version in your board. Intel has removed IRST 14.5 completely from their download pages, but 14.0 is still there. Here's IRST 14.6 for you to try:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25165/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-RAID-Driver

Next question, which I should not be needing to ask you (I should know!), but do you have the Dynamic Storage Accelerator (DSA) option in the UEFI/BIOS of your board? I'm not sure if that exists in the Z170 boards with PCIe SSDs.

If you have the DSA option, and it is enabled, you can configure it in the IRST Windows UI.

Let us know if you did not use 14.6, or if you already do and still have this problem.




Edited by parsec - 16 Sep 2015 at 2:30pm

No NVMe SM951s that I'm aware of, plus the Windows NVMe driver causes write issues the the NVMe SM951. Just checking which version you have.

I would not worry about HWiNFO not seeing all the drives in it display. Is that the Sensor Status display, or the System Summary display?

The read speed results are way off what they should be IMO. That might be an IRST bug, seriously. I don't know if 14.0 would work in RAID 0.

What size SM951s are you using?

My single SM951's read speed is much better in AS SSD.

Are you using a video card? Do you know what the PCIe power saving option in your Windows Power Plan is set to? You should check that.

I won't have my RAID 0 of two SM951s running until next week, so can't compare notes on that yet... but I will!

That Samsung power plan will change some things for the better for SSD performance, but it won't do anything for a PCIe SSD as far as I know.

I'm talking about this setting:



The other options are two levels of power savings. Given your video card, you might have this setting set to Off now, but it's worth checking.

Intel SATA Option ROMs can be changed in UEFI/BIOS updates. ASRock has done that for some boards.

I must say that I'm NOT certain that the 14.5 Option ROM is the problem. My SM951 is in a Z97 board with an IRST 13 Option ROM. I'm simply going by what Intel has done with IRST 14.6.

I'll be able to test myself next week, but probably not until Wednesday, 9/23.

Thanks for posting the link to that review, very interesting and informative in many ways beyond just the comparison of your Crystal results to theirs. Several things to discuss.

Jumping ahead, take a look at page 2 of the review and the version of the IRST driver they used, in the second paragraph:

http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm951-m2-pcie-ssds-raid0-performance_161753/2

To quote: "We used Intel RST storage drivers, the exact version was 13.1.0.1058".

That shocked me initially, until I discovered their RAID 0 array was not an OS drive, it is the D: drive.

When I tried to install the F6 IRST driver during my Windows 8.1 installation on my SM951 used in my ASRock Z97 Extreme6 board, it would not install. That's when I learned you cannot install the IRST driver (at least a 13.x version) unless a SATA drive is connected to one of the Intel SATA ports.

I'm still surprised by their ability to create a RAID 0 array from the two SM951s. Where did they do it, in the Legacy IRST utility invoked with Ctrl I during POST? The UEFI IRST utility in the UEFI? Or in the IRST Windows program? Can't find that information in the review.

Back to my starting point, the test platform they used is utterly different than yours (and soon to be my own too.) An Asus X99 board with PCIe M.2 adapter cards in the PCIe slots. I suspect this might be a difference beyond the obvious, in the way the Z170 board is allocating resources versus an X99 board. No more details on that until I see my results on a Z170 board.

Did you ever run a benchmark on a single SM951? I doubt it, since you just jumped into creating the RAID 0 array and installing Windows, right? Makes sense but I wish we had that test. I'll be doing that myself, testing a single SM951 first.

My SM951 on my Z97 board, although a 256GB model,  is very close to their single drive results. I posted that in this thread on page 8, you may have seen that.

I could go on but not much point for now. I would suggest trying the other IRST driver, IRST 13.1.0.1058 is available on the Intel IRST download page. That still seems... bizarre IMO.

One thing I am very curious about is hard to explain, but I see it in the review with the AS SSD results. There is a lot that is unexplained and does not make sense. Also note the ATTO results were strange, I'm wondering the these benchmarks are not working correctly. You saw that yourself in your testing.

I'll give you a taste of the strangeness, AS SSD reports the driver being used in the information area on the left where it shows the test volume's capacity. The driver is storahci. That's the Microsoft generic AHCI driver. That is normal for a single SM951, it won't use the IRST driver which is a perfectly fine AHCI driver too.  But three in RAID 0 is still storahci? It would normally be iaStorA, the Intel IRST driver's name, iaStorA.sys, for any RAID array of SATA SSDs.

When I get my Z170 Extreme7+ system next week, we'll see what happens. I spent over an hour writing this post and checking things. Your results are driving me crazy...