Heavy Stuttering with Samsung 960EVO NVMe drive

[Miasmata]

Hello,
Just over the last weekend I’ve been performing the laborious task of reinstalling Windows onto a new storage device - giddy with anticipation, I finished installing Windows 10 on my brand new Samsung 960EVO, excited to see just how fast it was, but when I loaded into Windows, all I had happening was stuttering, and a lot of it. Voice communications over Discord were laggy, Chrome took forever to start, and just browsing Explorer was a difficulty.

I’ve attempted numerous fixes that I’ve found around the place, such as turning off CSM in the BIOS, installing, and reinstalling, the Samsung NVMe drivers, and checking the performance monitor to see if there was a culprit, but nothing has worked - AS SSD showed a normal 2500MB/s and 1700MB/s sequential read/write, but with shockingly slow random 4k/4k 64 thread read/write times.

Am I just stuck with a not-great drive, or would I have some other problem such as compatibility?

I understand this is quite open ended, so any questions you could provide that I have answers to would help you to help me. Also, I’m new to the forum so please let me know if I have done something incorrectly, or not conforming to rules and such.

[jmarket]

Hi Miasmata and welcome to PCHF

What version of Windows are you running?

[plodr]

OP stated

I finished installing Windows 10 on my brand new Samsung 960EVO

Sorry I can’t help with the ssd. I have never installed one.

[Miasmata]

Hi jmarket, thanks for the warm welcome!

I’m running Windows 10 Pro 64x, build 14393.1066. I can provide an extensive list of currently running drivers, services, programs, connected devices, PC specs, anything you might need.

[jmarket]

Please download MiniToolBox and save it to your desktop. Run the program by right clicking on it and selecting Run as administrator. When the program opens select the following boxes:

Flush DNS
Report IE Proxy Settings
Reset IE Proxy Settings
Report FF Proxy Settings
Reset FF Proxy Settings
List content of Hosts
List IP Configuration
List Winsock Entries
List last 10 Event Viewer Errors
List Installed Programs
List Devices (Only Problems)
List Users, Partitions and Memory size

Please post the log in your next reply

[Miasmata]

Here is the log as requested - I have censored out my PC name in various places however as it contains my real name in part, but it shouldn’t impact readability.

[jmarket]

Thanks for the log

Have you ensured all drivers are up-to-date? Sometimes an outdated driver can trigger slow times as they don’t have the necessary functions to write at their proper speeds.

[Miasmata]

Gigabyte App Center states that every installed driver related to itself is up-to-date, and I’ve hand-checked every driver (including Gigabyte ones, just in case App Center wasn’t correct) and other drivers including Samsung’s NVMe drivers. This is a relatively new install of Windows 10, installed Saturday and had problems since the start. Booting in safe mode provided slightly faster read/write speeds on the drive, but not by much (as would be expected, with no background programs,) leading me to either believe that like you’ve guessed, a driver somewhere is out of date, or there’s perhaps a hardware problem.

[plodr]

What version of the Samsung driver are you using? I’ve read threads where people had trouble with the current 2.2 driver and even the 2.1 driver.

You might want to see if you can download the two versions of drivers you don’t have and perhaps see if one of those works better for you.

[jmarket]

I see from your log you have Samsung magician installed. Run it and there are several tests you can run on the drive and you can also optimize it from within the app. It is user friendly, although not necessary to have running at startup as is the default.

[Miasmata]

The new version (5.0) of Magician only provides a Performance Benchmark tool, SMART info display, and a system compatibility checker, not much to do from there unfortunately.
As for Samsung’s NVM Express drivers, I honestly can’t find where to download older versions, and right now I have version 2.2 installed, although I was having these problems while using Microsoft’s default drivers as well.

[jmarket]

I don’t know if it’s good value going back to older drivers? I’ll summon some help for you.
@phillpower2, @Evan Omo

[plodr]

I found v 2.1
http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/HDD...iver-2-1.shtml

Driver v 2.0; although the page is translated from German, the driver appears to be UK English

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://downloads.netmediaeurope.de/77388/samsung-nvme-treiber/&prev=search

I found this on a Dell site about NVMe drives

Should I use NVMe drives with MBR?
A: No, Dell recommends NVMe drives be configured via UEFI & GPT for optimal performance, security and reliability.
So is the drive using UEFI and has it been formatted as GPT rather than MBR?

[Malnutrition]

Can also use Snappy Driver Installer…

Snappy driver installer.

https://forum.windowsinstructed.com/uploads/monthly_2016_08/2016-05-01_18h54_18.thumb.png.1ee2c74e2dcba355bfb62aae7246e9ce.png

[Miasmata]

I’ve read of numerous problems with v2.0 of Samsung’s NVMe drivers with the 960 EVO so I’ll give 2.1 a shot and if I have no change, I’ll swap back to 2.2 in the meantime, then check out Snappy, I’ll edit this post soon with results.

I can also 100% confirm that this drive was installed under UEFI with GPT layout.

Also apologies if my responses are late or slow, I’m in Australia so we’re evidently having timezone difficulties xD

EDIT: Downloaded and installed Samsung’s NVMe v2.1 driver, slight performance increase, but not by much.
Snappy is giving me a long list of drivers to update and install, which tells me Gigabyte App Center sucks - 600MB of driver updates! Waiting for it to download now and will edit again on completion.

EDIT 2: OK Snappy did absolutely no favours for me. I’m now stuck with even worse read/write speeds (SIGNIFICANTLY worse, from 2500/1700 MB/s sequential to 400/300 MB/s) and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to get rid of them and reinstall Samsung’s drivers so I at LEAST have some speed. This has changed my PC from being slightly usable to completely unusable.