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April 29th, 2023 04:00
New NVMe drive installed and underperforming due to RAID on set in BIOS by default
I installed a new WD BLACK SN850X 1TB replacing in slot 1 (PCIe Gen 4) of my DELL Inspiron 16 Plus (7610 ) the original Kioxia KBG40ZNS512G 512GB. The Kioxia got degraded to slot 2 (PCIe Gen 3). To my surprise, CrystalDiskMark 8 has shown that the "best of the best" SN850X performs worse than the budget Kioxia except for the sequential read scores. Worse even, the Inspiron got a very annoying hiccup, stalling randomly here and there for a few or even a few dozen seconds - while attempting to a new app e.g.
Not a short research directed me to the DELL BIOS settings where under the Storage tab there is a default choice "RAID on". I followed (important!) the procedure described here: https://support.thinkcritical.com/kb/articles/switch-windows-10-from-raid-ide-to-ahci, where I went from here https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/Pros-Cons-AHCI-vs-Raid-On-XPS13-9300-NVMe/td-p/7636984 and voilá: the Intel Rapid Storage controller gave up to the original WD and KIOXIA controllers and both disks went up immediately in their scores. The WD finally showed better scores than KIOXIA (although I expected more gap in the random read/write area, but it seems that since at least 2019's Samsung 970 EVO Plus there is no real breakthrough in the field, so from the user - or gamer - perspective, the faster PCIe Gen 4 drives bring no noticeable gain). Note: when doing a benchmark check disable Windows write-cache buffer flushing in the WD dashboard to get max random write readouts, and disable Windows write-cache buffer altogether to get max sequential write readouts - after the benchmarking revert to the default settings, they seem to be working well in the real world.
And most importantly the perceived performance of my machine, which I use to make my living as a WordPress developer, went up significantly - no hiccups anymore (so far). BTW: check if your Windows power plan settings are not set to switch off the disk after a short time - for SSD drives, this is not needed any longer.
Not a good idea for DELL to set the BIOS storage settings by default to "RAID on" instead of AHCI/NVMe still in modern times.
I_Jani_I
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July 5th, 2023 02:00
I found the culprit: it was Active Protection (active by default) from "Acronis True Image for Western Digital", I switched it off, and the problems ended.
I_Jani_I
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April 30th, 2023 23:00
Also see this old but good set of hints https://www.easeus.com/amp/computer-instruction/ssd-slow-write-speed.html
I_Jani_I
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May 1st, 2023 10:00
I still got very slow write speeds though
Following this thread at WD I also checked if the PCIe slot works at a Maximum Payload Size of 256 bytes and it does.
bacillus1
2 Intern
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May 1st, 2023 12:00
are you using the latest 620331WD firmware?
fwiw I saw no difference in performance between ahci and raid on a single disk.
I_Jani_I
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May 2nd, 2023 00:00
Yes, I am. With "RAID on" ON the dashboard was not even showing the Interface Speed tile (bottom right on the screenshot), which is being shown now with the "AHCI/NVMe" BIOS Storage setting ON.
Saltgrass
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May 3rd, 2023 13:00
The way to get an NVMe drive to perform is to use the Intel driver which shows as Intel SATA/PCIe Premium, if you leave the Bios setting as RAID. Do not install the Optane memory drivers, if you do not have Optane memory.
My testing was done several years ago, so something may have changed but I doubt it.
And, of course, it needs all four PCIe lanes.
I_Jani_I
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May 5th, 2023 03:00
As I wrote in my original post, the "RAID on" setting + the Intel Rapid Storage controller gave poorer results than the one I work with now (the "AHCI/NVMe" + original Microsoft driver recommended by WD) AND the RAID+Intel setting is not compatible fully with the WD Dashboard (with this setting the WD Dashboard does not show the PCIe type used)