These are my reseach notes for trying to find out why my new Samsung Evo 850 SSD was not running at advertised speeds in my Dell E6540 Laptop.
Settings I tried and the results:
- Chipset drivers set as IRRT but running in ACHI mode in bios (No Change)
- using a standard ahci drive from microsoft 2006 causing issues (No Change)
- use intel RST technology but make sure this is the driver being used (No Change)
- c state setting in bios (No Change)
- Disable the samsung RAPID Mode as it is only a RAM disk
- Intel speed step disabled (a bit better)
- Single core rather than multi (slower IOPS read if i restrict to 1 core because not proper 1 CPU emulation, 1 core giving half speed and thus maxing the core out.)
- UEFI / Legacy MBR (No Change)
Other Settings Not tried or are not applicable:
- I can bump those 4K random read/writes up by disabling C1e and c-states in my BIOS
- Other power settings in bios
So the Specific Settings I have available in my Dell E6540 are:
- System Status
- SATA Operation = AHCI
- Performance
- Multi Core Support
- Intel SpeedStep
- C-States Control
- Intial Turboboost
None of these made any difference.
Other things to try that have been suggested:
- Try safe mode
- Try running prime 59 whilst running the Performance program because the CPU is kicked in fully
- Window has power management features that could throttle the CPU
- See if the drive is faulty by trying it in a Desktop PC with a powerful SATA chipset.
Conclusion
It is my chipset that has a limitation. Not all laptops were designed to handle SSD speeds because when these laptops were getting designed, SSDs were not main stream yet.