Dell G7 15 7588 Upgrade M.2 SATA SSD to M.2 PCIE NVME SSD

Are you sure Raid is turned on? 

Not to hijack this thread but I'm having trouble with getting the SX8200 to negotiate lanes on the PCI Express bus. For some reason it will only give me 1 lane.

I tried turning off the power management to the PCI bus but still only uses 1 lane. It's killing the read speeds.

Thanks for the reply.  RAID is definitely not turned on.  It has always been set to AHCI.  From what I read it needs to be set to AHCI in order to have NVME.

JOcean,

Absolutely brilliant.  Thank you so much for your help.

After I received the UNACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DRIVE the system automatically restarts.

1.  Automatic Repair Screen => Advanced Options

Automatic Repair

2.  Choose an option Screen => Troubleshoot

 Choose an Option

3.  Troubleshoot Screen => Advanced Options

Troubleshoot

4.  Advanced Options Screen => See More Recovery Options

Advanced Options

5.  Advance Options Screen => Startup Settings

Advanced Options

6.  Startup Settings Screen => Restart

 Startup Settings

7.  Startup Settings Screen => Select Option (4) Enable Safe Mode

8.  Log In and then Restart.

Thanks again for all your help.

If you have a chance could you try do a benchmark with AS SSD and post your results here? I'm just curious.

eta: I tried to boot from safe mode like the previous poster said and it does work. I'm not sure if you can do it on a fresh drive or not.

It still doesn't fix the problem with the pcie bus. It still only uses the Gen 2 bus protocol instead of the Gen 3 x4 protocol. Gen 2 is plenty for the write but it throttles the read speed on the sx8200. The fastest I can get it is 2200 MB/s by tweaking the power settings to always on full power.

From what I've read you should find yourself in the exact same boat as me. If the G7 does happen to have drivers that negotiate the Gen3 x4 PCIe and allow you the advertised speeds on the XPG on the bus I want them.

Oh and you can't use the Adata toolbox in RAID mode either, which **bleep**. It only works with the stornvme driver 

Always glad to help out. That is why we are all here..glad it worked out!

JOcean,

Absolutely Brilliant.  Thank you so much for your help.

After receiving the INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DRIVE Error Blue Screen the system automatically restarts.

1.  Automatic Repair Screen => Advanced Options

2.  Choose An Option Screen => Troubleshoot

3.  Troubleshoot Screen => Advanced Options

4.  Advanced Options Screen => See More Recovery Options

5.  Advanced Options Screen => Startup Settings

6.  Startup Settings Screen => Restart

7.  Startup Settings Screen => Enable Safe Mode (4)

8.  Log in and then Restart.

Tried to insert pics but, post went to administrator.

Thanks again.

The photos didn't post but I'm guessing 1300 write and 1000 read? I was getting slower reads which makes no sense.

Power and sleep -  additional power setting - change plan settings - change advanced power settings

From that Window go to PCI Express and expand Link State Power Management, set "Plugged in" and "On Battery" to "Off". I suppose you don't need to change the battery setting but I did.

From what I read the power management drops it to Gen2 as part of the power savings. This is supposed to fix that but from my benchmarks it's still throttling somewhere. I haven't played with any other power settings yet but there may be something in them that supersedes the PCI express settings.

It may also be the graphics card. I have the 1060 GTX and it's only running at Gen3x4 @ 8GT/s when it's capable of Gen3x8 @ 16GT/s. I'm not sure what kind of bus speeds it actually uses but it suggests to me the MB is limited and the bus is rationing bandwidth. My G3 has TB3 and that must use at least 6 lanes of bandwidth (x4 for 20gb/s up and 20gb/s down + 2 lanes for the display port). I'd like to run the drive from an NVME enclosure through the TB port and see if I get the full read speeds.

eta: in the G3 BIOS there's a Thunderbolt setting for mixed or direct mode. I think if you set the TB3 to USB only it may allow the SSD to negotiate all 4 lanes on the bus. I'm just guessing but it makes sense that the TB chip is reserving lanes for the different modes it supports. Worth a shot I guess.

The pics finally posted.

It looks like you might already have the power settings off. Mine were considerably lower before the tweaking, but maybe yours are set at 80 or 90%?

Changing the TB in the BIOS had no effect. It's changing the boot protocol and has nothing to do with the bus and negotiating the PCIe.

Trying to make sense of the PCIe encoding and protocol is beyond me. It looks like the throttling may be a result of the Active State Power Management. For some reason it's showing that it doesn't have ASPM on the port. That would explain why HWinfo shows high exit latency on L0s and L1. If there's no ASPM the protocol is to keep the bus in the L1 or L0s power state and never initiate the L0 fully active state. 

I'm not sure but if you compare the video pci-pci bridge and the SSD pci-pci bridge the only difference is the SSD is hotplug capable. From the PCIe specifications:

When a component does not advertise that it supports L0s, as indicated by its ASPM Support field value being 00b or 10b, it is recommended that the component’s L0s Exit Latency field return a value of 111b, indicating the maximum latency range. Advertising this maximum latency range may 25 help discourage legacy software from enabling L0s if it otherwise would do so, and thus may help avoid problems caused by legacy software mistakenly enabling L0s on this component or the component on the other side of the Link

Long story short, using hotplug protocol on the SSD port might be the reason it's stuck using the 2.5GT/s protocol.

Thought I would share my experience. I purchased a XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro m2 card from Amazon for around $75. Had to turn off RAID in the bios and turn on AHCI to boot the Windows 10 Installer or it would just hang and hang.

I'm getting about 2200MB/s.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : https://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) : 2182.276 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2277.053 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= : 1410.557 MB/s [ 344374.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= : 812.393 MB/s [ 198338.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 606.961 MB/s [ 148183.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 373.539 MB/s [ 91196.0 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 64.114 MB/s [ 15652.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 128.292 MB/s [ 31321.3 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 64.4% (306.9/476.3 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2019/09/05 18:15:16
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 18362] (x64)