ADent's Build: Another P55M-UD2 Build - i7-870 - 8400GS

[ADent]

P.S. You say you have an i7-870 and say it's Sandy Bridge, is this correct? I thought the 870 is a Lynnfield CPU.

You are correct - this thing is older than I thought. Lynnfield using the Nehalem microarchitecture.

I didn't see your post, I apparently wasn't watching the thread, so no notice of a reply. Reply again if you still need that.

 

[ADent]

Update - Now booting off of a PCIe NVME drive!

There is a very short time NVME SSDs were sold that supported booting via BIOS. Samsung 950 PRO is the most famous, but supposedly Plextor M8Pe(Y) - the (Y) comes with the PCIe adapter - Kingston HyperX Predator also work.

I used a classic Lycom DT-120 M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter.

Lycom DT-120 M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MYCQP38/

This is not super fact since this motherboard is PCIe v2 - but I am getting 2.8x on writes and 1.2x on reads per Blackmagic compared to the SSD connected to the SATA ports.

 

[ADent]

More details to the quick post above.

I am not booting directly off the PCIe drive - I am booting off my old SATA SSD into Clover (r4871) and then choosing to boot off the PCIe SSD.

I can boot directly off of the PCIe drive in Windows 10 (had to install twice to get it to actually work) - but from the Windows side it does not look like Clover can boot off of the PCIe drive in BIOS mode. Some of those Windows guys are booting off a USB thumb drive into Clover, then booting the PCIe SSD. (All old posts from when the Samsung 950 was new)

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First I cloned the drive using Clonezilla (downloaded ICO, burned it with Toast, booted off of the CD), which does a byte by byte copy.

Clover didn't find the new drive. So there is a lot of things that can be done, but it looks like I needed NvmExpressDxe.efi. You can fire up Clover Configurator. Mount the EFI drive. Select the item from the Install Drivers section and download.
- Unfortunately it would download the file (where does it go?) - but couldn't move the file. Apparently v5 puts the drivers in the Drivers/UEFI or Drivers/BIOS folder in the CLOVER directory. If you create those folders by hand in an installation that doesn't have them (like my setup) - the CCv5 will install them.
- Unfortunately my setup doesn't read the drivers in those folders (I am still using an old version of Clover - r4871). You can check by looking at the Boot.log (CCv5, Boot.log, Generate log) - look for the [ LoadDrivers ] section.
- So you can put that driver in many places and it won't cause problems - narrowing it down it is happy on my machine in the drivers64 directory

Then the drive could be selected in Clover and boots. Renamed the drive to avoid confusion.

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Blackmagic gives me 696 write MB/s and 361 MB/s read on the Samsung 950 Pro 512GB.
My Crucial MX500 500GB drives connected to the internal SATA (blue port) - 256 MB/s write and 270 MB/s read
My 5TB TOSHIBA HDWE150 172 write and 173 read.

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Theoretically one could use any M.2 drive if you boot into Clover and it can support the drive. The Samsung 950 does support booting directly via BIOS, but it appears Clover doesn't like that. So, in theory, Chamelion supported OS should be able to boot directly off the PCIe card - but I don't want to go back to 10.9 and try.

I may try updating to the latest Clover on the PCIe drive and see if makes any difference - I just got this working yesterday.

 

[ADent]

Data from XBench - not sure this is reliable, but interesting. I get some variation on the 4K sequential reads - I show 78 MB/s below, but I have seen runs in the 50s and one in the upper 20s. Everything else is pretty consistent run to run.

I do know the Samsung Firmware is out of date and I haven't checked temperatures - the Lycom doesn't come with any cooler and it is warm in the room.

Sytem Report does show the Lycom card in x4 Link Width and TRIM supported.


XBench - Samsung 950 Pro
Drive Type Samsung SSD 950 PRO 512GB
Disk Test 981.93
Sequential 586.70
Uncached Write 741.60 455.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 1049.92 594.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 266.72 78.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 1302.63 654.69 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 3009.01
Uncached Write 3396.45 359.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 1960.69 627.69 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 6530.20 46.28 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 2689.92 499.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]


XBench - Crucial MX500
Drive Type CT500MX500SSD1
Disk Test 593.50
Sequential 377.83
Uncached Write 460.56 282.78 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 401.19 227.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 252.07 73.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 511.27 256.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 1382.82
Uncached Write 1838.38 194.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 731.99 234.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 4693.80 33.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 1299.57 241.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

XBench
Drive Type TOSHIBA HDWE150
Disk Test 130.12
Sequential 269.72
Uncached Write 320.05 196.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 290.02 164.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 185.00 54.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 350.60 176.21 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 85.74
Uncached Write 23.69 2.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 643.49 206.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 719.10 5.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 669.32 124.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]