The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    PM951 SSD NVMe Samsung 512GB utility_firmware questions

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by pinco000, Jan 11, 2017.

  1. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    69
    Likes Received:
    10
    Trophy Points:
    16
    Hi guys, I own a Alienware 17 R3 with the above SSD. Im wondering if there is any utility to look after the health and speed of the SSD as I have disabled the automatic defrag in Windows 10. I went to samsungs website but couldnt find anything related to my SSD apart from few pdf files.

    Also firmware update seems to be nonexistent. Im currently using BXV77D0Q.
    Can you guys please help out and point me to software I could use or a place where to look for genuine drivers?

    Thank you
     
  2. fiziks

    fiziks Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    94
    Messages:
    480
    Likes Received:
    59
    Trophy Points:
    41
    pinco000 likes this.
  3. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    69
    Likes Received:
    10
    Trophy Points:
    16
    are you sure those drivers are form my ssd? It doesnt say anywhere


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
  4. fiziks

    fiziks Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    94
    Messages:
    480
    Likes Received:
    59
    Trophy Points:
    41
    It doesn't say it's for my PM961 NVMe drive, either, but after installing the 2.0 driver version, there was a noticeable improvement over the M$ generic NVMe driver
     
  5. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    69
    Likes Received:
    10
    Trophy Points:
    16
    Ok, Im gonna try this afternoon. Cheers


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
  6. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    12,035
    Messages:
    11,278
    Likes Received:
    8,814
    Trophy Points:
    931
    Just use Crystal Disk Info or Crystal Disk Mark or HWinfo. With the inbox NVMe drive you get Temperature, Drive Health and Spare/Reallocated Sectors.
     
  7. pinco000

    pinco000 Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    69
    Likes Received:
    10
    Trophy Points:
    16
    thank you


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
    Vasudev likes this.
  8. willy333

    willy333 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi, can fizzie or any one help me this. I try the

    Hi, I have the Alienware R3 with PM951 too. I try the link and the latest NVME driver is vers 2.2. When I try to install the NVME dirver, it quote that there is no Samsung SSD.

    My question is: 1)Do your BIOS still set as RAID as per facotry default? 2)Have you installed Samsung Magacian and can your PM951 be located by the Magacian? For me the Magacian can not show my PM951 though it can show all other drives include USB drives. 3)Any hint to help me install the NVME driver and let Magacian seeing PM951?
     
  9. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    12,035
    Messages:
    11,278
    Likes Received:
    8,814
    Trophy Points:
    931
    Stick with native NVMe driver from MSFT. Samsung driver may cause cause conflict during OS upgrades.
     
  10. willy333

    willy333 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    You mean the Samsung driver is not designed for PM951 thus may cause conflict?
    The following is the SSD test result, is the random read/write speed looks bad?

    CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1 x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo
    Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    * MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
    * KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
    Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 142.993 MB/s
    Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 138.500 MB/s
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.035 MB/s [ 496.8 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.143 MB/s [ 523.2 IOPS]
    Sequential Read (T= 1) : 142.196 MB/s
    Sequential Write (T= 1) : 137.586 MB/s
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.851 MB/s [ 207.8 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.960 MB/s [ 478.5 IOPS]
    Test : 50 MiB [D: 39.7% (369.8/931.4 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
    Date : 2017/07/16 8:44:29
    OS : Windows 10 [10.0 Build 15063] (x64)
     
  11. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    12,035
    Messages:
    11,278
    Likes Received:
    8,814
    Trophy Points:
    931
    How much free space you have on that disk?
     
  12. willy333

    willy333 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    more than 300G free spaces
     
  13. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    12,035
    Messages:
    11,278
    Likes Received:
    8,814
    Trophy Points:
    931
    RAID or AHCI?
     
  14. willy333

    willy333 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    I use the Alienware R3 original RAID setup
     
  15. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    12,035
    Messages:
    11,278
    Likes Received:
    8,814
    Trophy Points:
    931
    Have you tried driver update from Dell?
     
  16. willy333

    willy333 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Yes, but no more updated one available. The HD driver is dated 2016 from microsoft, storage controller is dated 2016 from Intel
     
  17. Vasudev

    Vasudev Notebook Nobel Laureate

    Reputations:
    12,035
    Messages:
    11,278
    Likes Received:
    8,814
    Trophy Points:
    931
    :
    Have you tried running check disk on both ssd and hdd? Use these commands listed below:
    1. chkdsk /f /x C:
    2. chkdsk /f /x D: