Can anyone explain these benchmark results?

This is what the latest version of Samsung Magician shows for my system. I was expecting to see the NVME drive far outperform the SATA drive, but that was not the case. The NVME drive is my boot drive, and the SATA drive is for temp files, My Documents, and general work-in-progress stuff. Based on these results I'm thinking maybe I should swap the usage and use the SATA drive to boot from.

One possibility is that the SATA drive is set to use Rapid Mode, which essentially buffers the data I/O to the drive, so maybe this is the reason for the results I got. Perhaps Samsung has gimicked their benchmark to take advantage of that.

Yes, but....

I thought maybe the driver had been updated, so I downloaded and reinstalled it.

No change in the benchmark results.

Device Manager says the driver is Microsoft Ver. 10.0.18362.1, and the driver details looks like this:



Naturally none of this matches the Samsung driver version number of 3.2, so it's not clear what driver is actually running. The Driver Update function says the most current driver is installed.

Thanks for that - I hadn't thought about looking at Storage Controllers.

So I did, and it shows the same as that message thread - I have the Samsung 3.2.0.1910 driver installed.

Check with CrystalDiskMark. The SATA 3 theoretical limit is 6 Gb/s, which is equivalent to 750 MB/s.

Here are the Crystal results:


Top one is the NVME drive, bottom SATA.
The data doesn't precisely match up, but it does clearly show that the SATA drive is out performing the NVME one by a fairly large margin. Obviously something somewhere is wacked.

I'll look at the BIOS and see if I can find anything interesting. My motherboard is Asus P8Z77-M and I do believe I've got the current BIOS. I'll check that too.

- - - Updated - - -

The only thing I could find in the BIOS that looked like it was applicable was this, and it is enabled:

It is AMI Native NVME Driver Support

Why am I getting impossibly high results on my Samsung 860 EVO SSD?