Samsung SM951 Gigabyte M.2 socket performance

[nry]

Built myself a new workstation which I'm really happy with, performs much better than my laptop

Originally I was expecting a little more from the SM951 SSD, given that this should do over 1GB/s I'd like to see if I can squeeze any more performance out of it. Got a feeling like I'm pushing my luck too far given my hardware choices.

Current performance

I'm using a Gigabyte GZ-Z97X-UD3H board (http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4979) which from what I understand the M.2 slot on this board is limited to 2x link width which explains the result I'm getting.

Questions

1) If I bought a M.2 PCIe adapter such as this LyCOM DT-120 http://www.amazon.co.uk/LyCOM-DT-12...id=1447337650&sr=8-1&keywords=m2+pcie+adapter would I get better performance?

2) Would I be able to boot from this? (even if this is a yes, I'm skeptical about being able to boot my Hackintosh on this)

3) Would there be any issues with the number of PCIe lanes given the hardware I have installed:
- nVidia GTX 980 at x16
- PCIe Wireless/Bluetooth adapter at x1 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MBP25UK)
- Myricom 10GbE adapter at 8x (10G-PCIE2-8B2-2S)

 

[pyro_]

Yes that card should work and you should get addition performance as long as you plug it into one of your pcie 16x slots otherwise if you use the other pcie slots it needs to go through the dmi link between the chipset and cpu which is limited to pcie 2.0 x4 speeds

You would most likely be able to book from it as you do today as it should not matter where the pcie lanes are coming from for the ssd

Note that you would need to move the 10gbe adapter to be able to do this so would be up to you to decide which you need the speed of more the ssd or the 10gbe

Pretty much the only boards that can use all those devices at full speed/pcie lanes today will need to be based on either the x99 or 170 chipsets. Z97 just does not have enough pcie lanes directly off the cpu

 

[nry]

Had a little play with the configuration. It turns out with the GPU in the top PCIe slot and the 10GbE adapter in the bottom, all the 1x slots were disabled. So the wifi/bluetooth adapter had to be moved to the middle 8x slot which forces the GPU to run at 8x.

Not the end of the world, most reviews suggest that there shouldn't be any performance hit on the GPU but I guess this answers all my questions before that I'm stuck with the M.2 drive running at 2x link width.

Guess if I want more performance I'll have to upgrade yet again, but given that this hackintosh works fine I'll learn to live with it

 

[Patriot]

You should still be able to get over 700MB/s on them... try a different benchmark program....

 

[alex1002]

@Patriot what do you think about selling the board and buying a better one?

 

[nry]

Get about 747MB/s which will have to do I guess

 

[Patriot]

Get about 747MB/s which will have to do I guess

Have you only tried that one benchmark program? The Qdepth or size used may not be optimum ... do a sweep with FIO.... you should have enough bandwidth for 1200MB/s ...