Dell XPS 15 with Samsung PM951 NVMe SSD - speed testing
A family member recently got a Dell XPS 15 Core i7, with the 512GB SSD option. With a need for virtualization performance and a bit of light gaming, the extra bit of umph of the Core i7 seemed worth the trade-off in battery life.
After firing it up, and letting Windows Update do its thing that included the time-consuming move from build 10286 to 10586.36, I couldn't resist giving ATTO Disk Benchmark a try. This is my first run, still using the default Windows 10 settings that were in this preload. Here's the results:
This is just a baseline, to see how it compares to what others are seeing. It's apparently using whatever driver loads for NVMe that's built into Windows 10 Home (64 bit):
What's also interesting is this dialogue going on with a TinkerTry visitor, who noticed his Dell XPS 15 9550 (Core i5) arrived with RAID mode set, and was wondering if AHCI mode would result in faster numbers:
I know PM951 is not as fast as 950 pro, but I wonder if its native use should be AHCI for faster performance
Wow, funny he should ask this, because I know what the similar (but not identical) SM951 is capable of, having had some hands-on time with three of them, a couple of months back:
Naturally, I have some further testing to do, to see if driver, power settings, BIOS settings, or other tweaks make a significant difference with the PM951. Stay tuned!
Jan 09 2016
Interesting, the performance has improved since December, don't really know why. Perhaps a Windows Update occurred that fixed something other than the still 10.0.10586.0 Windows NVMe driver. Full video of the test, and BIOS upgrade process, coming soon.
These systems still work great for many even 9+ years later, mine included, even with (unsupported) vSphere 8 and Windows 11 Version 21H2. But unless you added the optional TPM module, it may be the end of the line as far as repurposing them for running the latest Windows 11 Version 24H2 and beyond.