Alienware 17 R3 SM951 SSD LONG REBOOT TIME!

Hi All,

Just upgraded my Alienware 17 R3 to the Samsung SM951 PCIE NVME SSD 256GB. I changed bios boot mode to AHCI and got windows installed with expected crystal diskmark speeds. However upon system reboot my system will hang on a black screen for over a minute before it POST and boots into windows. Anyone else having this problem? Is there any other settings I need to change in the bios?

 

I have the same SSD which came with my laptop and tested it's speed and found that it has horrible write speeds, great read speeds but for some reason the write speeds were really bad. I switch my OS to my samsung 840 pro SSD.

 

Did you have any SATA 6gbps disk installed when you installed Windows?

Have you installed the Samsung NVMe driver?

 

Are you sure you dont have the PM 951 SSD? That is the one that comes stock with the AW PCIE SSD and has slow read speeds like 600mb/s

 

I tried to install the samsung nvme driver from the HP website but says already have latest driver and it seems to be reporting correctly in device manager. I get the expected speeds 2200mb/s read and 1250mb/s write. I removed the SATA 6gbps disk before installing windows. BIOS is set to AHCI. I just set bios to optimized defaults now rebooting normal speeds. I wonder if it was "CPU performance mode" being enabled that caused issue. I will try to renable and see if issue returns.

 

Hi Tony V,

That's odd. Just enabling performance mode should not affect the SSD, as the CPU and fan settings would still be the defaults. I suspect something else such as boot order wasn't right for that setup.

 

Check the "Legacy boot" option in the BIOS is turned off, this is known to cause super long POST times

 

It's all good now. I enabled cpu performance and boot time are normal. Recently updated bios think "load optimized defaults" did the trick

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

 

hi i have alienware 17 r3 and SM951. But bios in ahci mode dosnt see drive :/ i cant boot windows

 

Hi Gabrych,

Are you trying to install the O/S on the SSD? Do you have any other drives installed? Secure Boot enabled or disabled?

To install the SSD as O/S boot drive, remove any other drives, try that, if it's still not appearing then reset the BIOS to defaults, then access the BIOS and check AHCI is selected.

 

secure boot disable legacy support disable, iv tried connected only ssd in 1st m2 :/ in achi mode drive is not showing in bios but i can instal system on it. But after that system dont boot up. In raid mode bios see drive but windows instalation not xP

 

Hi Gabrych,

Try the BIOS reset to defaults, see if it boots, if not then check AHCI is enabled.

Which O/S are you installing?

 

windows 10 64bit. I have black screen after instalation reboot

no boot device found...

I think its because bios dont see the m2 drive (windows instalation see )

 

Right, I have the SM951 as my boot drive (W10 Pro) with Secure Boot on, Legacy OS Disabled and RAID mode (there is next to no difference between AHCI and RAID performance wise) so here is what I did:

Ensure Secure Boot is ON and switch to RAID

You'll need to create W10 USB stick using Rufus and selecting GPT partion.
Once the USB stick is created you'll need to copy the RAID driver to a new folder on the USB stick.
Extract the RAID driver from here - https://downloadcenter.intel.com/do...echnology-Intel-RST-RAID-Driver?product=55005
Copy all files from the ZIP to new folder on USB

Start Windows install, when Windows does not detect a drive, select the option to manually install a driver. Find the RAID driver on the USB stick that you copied over and voila, drive detected.

Install as normal.

 

Just out of curiosity, what are the options when you set to RAID? I want to RAID0 2 SSDs - are all the options like stripe size accessible in the BIOS or is there a separate menu after bootup for the RAID BIOS?

 

You can set your RAID volumes from within the BIOS, it's very straightforward. I did it with my 2 SSD's and very quickly set up a RAID 0 volume. Though I found the performance of 2 separate drives better for me as RAID speeds are limited by the slower, second M.2 slot. Still ruddy fast though!

 

Awesome. I was thinking of RAID0'ing 2 Samsung 950 Pro's to get the 4K random read/write speeds up as far as possible.. That'll produce the snappiest real world experience I figured..

 

Yeah that should give you some real good performance. A few of the guys here have done just that.