Samsung 960 evo not running full speed

[Terrorgod]

So I bought a Samsung 960 EVO off of amazon and installed it into my Alienware 17 R3 which has 2 m.2 slots available. The first slot is occupied by the stock SSD that came with it and the second slot is where the 960 is now. After initially using the Samsung software to copy my drive I did a speed test to getting about 1600 read and i forgot the rest due to it being way slower then advertised max speeds. I then changed RAID to AHCI and did a full reset but I cant get more then 1750 mbs. The Samsung Magician tool says I have PCI Gen 3 x 2 and I don't know if that's the bottleneck or if there is a way to get faster speeds. Any help would be appreciated as i'm a noob when it comes to this.

[manikyath]

to get its full speed that thing expects pcie 3.0 x4, and iirc those things also get quite toasty so may thermal throttle, not to any real-world noticeable degree tho.

 

having that said.. for it being in an x2 slot.. you're not going to notice the difference between 1750 and 3200 Mbps in anything other than benchmarks, or maybe some extremely large filesizes.

[Afromancer]

As a first step, have you tried updating the device software?

 

[Guest]

The theoretical limit of 2 lanes is somewhere around 2GB/s, so your speeds are where they should be.

[Terrorgod]

I did download the firmware from Samsungs website. And thanks for the comments about the speed being where it should for the amount of lanes!

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

1700mb/s is the maximum speed for PCIe 3.0 x2. 

 

Seeing as you're working with a laptop and customization hence is not really an option, you can't free up more lanes.  So basically this is as fast as it'll go. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

The issue I'm seeing is that NVMe drives are M-keyed. M-keyed M.2 devices should have access to 4 PCIe lanes. I mean, I could chalk this up to Dell not providing all four lanes.

 

On the other hand, I wouldn't worry about it. If you're not doing something that does rely heavily on storage performance, you're not going to miss out much on the 3200MB/sec Samsung claims the 960 Evo can get to.

[Terrorgod]

All right I got a clear picture of the situation. Thank you guys for all the help!

[NumLock21]

Your laptops's M.2 slot is limited to x2 speed instead of x4. This is done by Dell and only way to turn it back to full speed is with some bios modding or a bios update.