Alienware 17R3 and M.2 ports with Samsung 950 Pro report

Greetings everyone. There were a few threads with questions about the M.2 slots as well as what the best/fastest SSDs to plug into them would be and I promised to post my results once the got my Pro 950s I preordered.

Well I'm happy to save the drives are working well and I think I know what the ports support. I plugged two 512GB drives into each of the slots. Unfortunately there is no way to stripe them at the bios level and in fact the bios (A02) doesn't even see the drives at all. However, using a UEFI windows boot disk I was able to install windows onto the drives so it seems they are bootable. (although I had another small 2.5" SSD already installed and it might be using that as the boot manager I haven't checked yet)

Once windows was installed I tried running AS SSD with pretty disappointing performance. I check for drivers and found Samsung has special drivers available for the 950 Pros. I also installed Samsung Magician while I was at it, and while missing support for some of it's features, Magician does recognize the drives. It also provided some nice details (see screenshots below). It looks like M.2 has 4 channels, while the other only has 2. Benchmarking them again with the drivers gave much better results and seems to confirm that one drive doesn't have full bandwidth.

Overall though its working great and despite one drive being slightly gimped I think I'll be keeping both drives in the laptop.

Boot drive. Notice link width is 4 of 4

Storage drive. Notice link width is 2 of 4

Boot drive performance

Storage drive performance. Oddly the sequential read is a lot slower and the write is somewhat slower, yet because the 4k's were slightly faster it got a higher overall score. Also note that the Boot drive had windows running on it simultaneously which is why I expect the 4k's and read access were slower.

If anyone has any questions let me know.

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Alienware 17R3 and M.2 ports with Samsung 950 Pro report