Latitude e7470 with new PCIe SSD running slowly

Hello Everyone.

I have just purchased a Adata XPG 8200 PCIe ssd to replace my old m.2 ssd drive that shipped with my e7470.

I have put Windows 10 Pro on it, but it is not performing as expected. The drive has advertised speeds of up to 3500/3000MB for read / write. However, I am getting around 860/830mb.

I have installed HWINFO64 and checked the PCI Express settings for the drive. It states that the maximum link speed is 4x and the current link speed is 1x.

So something is not right. I am not sure whether it is a motherboard issue, as I would expect at least 2x. Or could it be the drive is faulty ? I did contact Adata customer support who advise I should try another disk in the computer. Unfortunately, I don't have a spare PCIe ssd lying around.

The laptop is also out of warrranty so Dell techincal support were less than helpful.

Can anyone suggest how I might get a resoluton for this ?

Thanks

 

How does the speed compare with the drive you pulled out? M.2 is the form factor of the drive - the physical shape of the drive. PCIe is the physical interface bus that the M.2 connector is connected to. NVMe is the protocol that is now used to talk to the drives over the PCIe bus.

Your old drive should be also M.2 PCIe NVMe, assuming that it came out of the same slot. A comparison of the speeds of both drives should let you know if your new drive is up to speed or not.

What are you using to test the speed? Crystal Disk Marks works well in Windows:
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/

In Linux you could just run this from the command line:
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda (assuming sda is the drive you're testing)

Hope you find the issue.

Trev

 

BTW I did look up the specs of the M.2 port on your latitude and you should be good to go. The specs state: PCle Gen3 8Gb/s (up to 4 lanes)

Trev

Edit - Just an observation here, but the port is rated at 8Gb/s. That would roughly translate to 1000 MB/s - (8Gb/s)/8 = 1000 MB/s or 1GB/s. With that in mind, the speeds you're seeing are in the ball park. One thing I'm not sure about how they're specifying the speed of the port on the Latitude. Is that rating for the combination of the 4 lanes of data combined or is that 8Gb/s per lane. That would make a difference for sure - 4 x the throughput.

 

I have not managed to get to the bottom of why the drive is not running at more than 1x link speed. I get around 850mb read/ write. I also replaced the Adata drive with another one to see if the old one was defective but it turns out I get the same results.

It may be a motherboard issue, as the drive should be able to operate on at least 2 lanes.

 

Is there a BIOS update available?

 

I have the latest BIOS. Dell wouldn’t help either!

 

Well, looking at the specs of the Adata Drive you're using, it's clear that they are specifying their speeds as a combination of all 4 lanes working, and since the Latitude also has a PCIe Gen 3 slot x 4, you should be seeing a lot fast speeds. The Dell spec has to be per lane. What was the speed of the original drive like? Did it use more than one lane?

 

The old drive was msata not pcie.
Speed wise, I was getting about 400-450 read speed. So the Adata drive is a big improvement, but is not operating at a speed I was expecting. I know that the port can go faster, as someone did it a while ago with the same laptop, using a Samsung...

https://www.laptopmain.com/dell-latitude-e7470-disassembly/

 

Do you mean the old drive was M.2 SATA? mSATA is a totally different connector interface. They are not physically compatible.

 

Yes the old drive was M.2 SATA.