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.
