Question about my 970evo fw and benchmark speeds

Hello,
Ive discovered this forum and see that is a wealth of knowledge and expertise. i have a question about my 970evo 250gb

After comparing my bench results to others Ive seen, I feel Im leaving some performance on the table. It is installed in the correct m.2 slot and is running at the highest speeds (asus maximus x code). I have the latest samsung driver installed, but I see via magician that there is a new firmware out there. I usually have a leery approach to fw updates. Has anyone gone from the version I have to the latest? Any issue? Performance increase?

Here is a crystal disk mark 5pass 1gb from today (LEFT) compared to day-one basically empty drive, on the windows drivers (RIGHT)

Benchmark Pic1.png

Benchmark Pic2.png



And here is magician showing the firmware version I have.

Magician GUI.png



Do my speeds look on par? I have seen some with much higher scores than me, notably in the q8t8 and 32t1. Or could it be related to 1.) comparing different sized drives and 2.)having about half the drive filled up, causing drops in speed?

Im worried if I update the firmware and its not good that I cant revert back, true right? Maybe Im just paranoid, but these days I second and triple guess ANY driver and firmware update that comes out. Having it in AHCI is correct right? Im not using raid and there wouldnt be any other option? Thanks all for the input.

Should I be removing the IRST interface and running a driver only? Is there any other info I can provide to be more specific? This storage stuff is certainly not my expertise. Thanks a lot.

EDIT by Fernando: Inserted pictures resized (to save space, can be enlarged) and directly attached by using the Forum software, appearance of the pictures improved (by cutting the supernatand borders)

@Guitarmageddon :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
I have moved your post into this better matching Sub-Forum “NVMe Performance” and hope, that this is ok for you.

Although I always use Anvil’s Storage Utilities, when I want to measure the performance of my SSDs, your benchmark results seem to be quite similar to my own I got while running the same NVMe SSD model.

Yes. Nevertheless I have done the Firmware update and didn’t recognize a noticeable performance drop thereafter.

What is in AHCI mode? The Intel SATA Controller and its in-use driver has nothing to do with the NVMe Controller.

If the NVMe SSD is the only in-use Disk Drive of your system, there is no need to install any Intel RST driver or Software.

By the way: If you want to know a better and easier way for the insertion of pictures, I recommend to have a look into the start post of >this< and >this< thread.

Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)

Thanks! Sorry about the pic sizes. I have a Samsung 500gb 860ssd. So I should just leave the irst app installed then?

When you ran your benches on the same model, was it the same size?

Also, can you clarify something for me… With a larger drive, is performance generally “better” than a smaller one? So if I were to run the same bench, but only now instead of 250gb , use a 1tb for example, is the potential there for higher results? Wonder if it was just me looking at other people’s results that had larger drives than my own.

Here are my answers:
1. If I were you, I would uninstall the Intel RST Software from within the Control Panel. You will not need it and it may have a negative impact on your AHCI and NVMe performance.
2. Yes, I made benchmark tests with a 250 GB Samsung 970 EVO SSD. Here are Anvil scores I got in June 2018 with my Z170 system while running the MS in-box NVMe driver:

Z170-NVMe-970EVO-STORNVME.png


3. Yes, the bigger the size of an SSD, the better is usually the performance.

Ok thanks. So just to clarify if I uninstall the actual irst "program", drivers are unaffected? Also should I be manually looking for updates to the rst driver by itself? Or am I understanding that wrong? Thank you