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Upon finding out the Alienware m15 r3 included two 2280 NVMe SSD bays plus a smaller 2230 bay I figured it would be an excellent opportunity to get up to speed with the latest and greatest in absurdly-fast-storage-devices.
What I didn’t expect was to happen upon a mystery. In this article I’ll be walking you through my experience of the Alienware m15 r3 and Crucials “P5” CT1000P5SSD8 SSD.
I just got an Alienware m15 r3 2070 super from Best Buy as a birthday gift from my wife. Now I am trying to add another hard drive. I have a WD blue 3D NAND SATA but it is not being detected as it is not compatible with the open SSD slot. I saw somewhere that the first SSD slot supports SATA, can anyone confirm that or is that just for m15 r2? Alienware 15 R3: Upgrade/Replace SSDLearn how to upgrade your Solid State Drive on the new Alienware 15 R3.For safety precautions and ESD protection video go.
To spoil it up front, it’s not exactly the most thrilling of adventures. I found during my tests that the P5 showed a weird performance profile that – while on a par with some of the numbers Crucial reported – appeared to exceed their own tests by quite some margin while insisting upon reporting sequential read speeds that fell far, far short of my expectations.
This is particularly curious because sequential reads are something that SSDs are particularly good at.
Fitting the SSD
First thing’s first, you can’t test an SSD without sticking it into your computer. Fortunately the process is incredibly simple with the m15 r3. All of the screws required to access the bottom of the computer are cross-head and all but two of them are captive within the base. The two rear screws must be retrieved fully and set aside, but the remaining screws stay attached to the bottom panel. This is handy, since during the course of my testing I have removed and replaced the bottom panel of the Alienware m15 r3 more times than I’d care to count.
While unscrewing the base, the captive screws also cause the central plastic clips to release automatically – effectively prying the panel off – which is a really nice touch. Despite the SSDs being the only thing that’s supposed to be user-serviceable (lots of m15 owners will re-apply thermal paste), Alienware have gone to great lengths to make opening this machine straightforward.
Further clips release along the front edge of the baseplate, and it lifts off cleanly. Inside you’ll find whatever SSDs are fit in your stock build and you might also notice the distinct lack of spare heatshields for the unpopulated SSDs. This is something of a bugbear I have with Alienware systems. The stock Micron drive shipped in the m15 (made by Crucial’s parent company) isn’t exactly a stellar performer and I’d expect many customers to buy the minimum storage configuration and install two high-performance 1Tb or 2Tb SSDs. On the plus side they do- at least- have the tiny screws required to secure the SSDs, the omission of these screws is a complaint I’ve seen with other systems.
Out comes the stock Micron drive and in goes the uh… Micron drive ?
Upgrading the @Alienware m15 r3 with a @CrucialMemory P5 SSD to see how it chooches. pic.twitter.com/Oqz4VPkDbd
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) August 5, 2020
The SSDs in the m15 r3 slot into a daughter board between the main board and the battery, this is an improvement over the nestled-in-the-battery style that the m15 r2 used.
Stock 512GB Micron SSD vs 1Tb Micron Crucial P5.
I still have no explanation for the P5s weirdly slow read speed.
Working on it! ? pic.twitter.com/ME4IDfZRLH
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) August 20, 2020
The Crucial P5 SSD handily destroys the stock Micron disk in the m15 r3. It seems a tragedy that a gaming laptop specced-to-the-hilt should have such a woefully underperforming disk but it seems almost a given that these drives will be replaced with aftermarket upgrades. I guess you’ve got to leave something for the end user to upgrade.
You will, however, notice that the sequential read speed of the Crucial P5 (pictured on the left) falls short of the write speeds quite considerably, and additionally doesn’t punch too high above the Micron disk. This was typical of every single benchmark I ran using the P5 SSD in the Alienware m15 r3. But *only* in the m15 r3.
Tests
Honestly after conducting these tests I’m sick of unscrewing the bottom of the Alienware laptops. They’re surely among the most easy-to-get-inside computers on the market, but tackling those 8 screws really wears on you quickly.
Crucial P5 1TB
With repeated tests Crucial’s 1TB P5 SSD benched with a sensible read speed in the Alienware m15 r2 (my workstation) but at almost half the expected value in the m15 r3. Switching betweeen AHCI and RAID, system disk or auxiliary disk and any other permutation of tweaks failed to bring the m15 r3 tests in line with the r2. Truly baffling.
Above: Crucial P5 1TB, tested in Alienware m15 r2
Above: Crucial P5 1TB, tested in Alienware m15 r3
Even after coaxing Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology drivers onto my system by manually installing the device, and then switching the disks into RAID mode and rebooting didn’t magically recover all of the mysterious missing performance. However it did seem to make somewhat of an impact- raising scores from around 1.6GB/s to 2.2GB/s.
I prefer running in AHCI, however, since the RAID controller sits between the SSDs and the system and obfuscates useful benchmarking info such as disk temperature. Indeed in RAID mode neither HWINFO64 nor Crucial Storage Excutive could tell me the temperature of the SSDs, so I couldn’t tell if a drop in performance was due to wind direction, stray cosmic rays or overheating.
Crucial P5 2TB
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Since I wanted to eliminate the issue being with the one specific 1TB P5 SSD I was testing, and additionally wanted to use the same disk as Crucial’s in-house test, I requested a 2TB P5 to replicate my experiments.
I tested this disk fresh out of box in both the Alienware m15 r2 and r3 and received very similar results to the 1TB part.
Both CrystalDiskMark and AJA System Test showed the same stonking write speeds alongside very similar and baffling slow read speeds. In the case of AJA System Test the write test is performed first and as far as I can tell the lower reported read speed (versus CrystalDiskMark) is a result of the drive getting pretty toasty and throttling to keep its temperature under control.
Above: Crucial P5 2TB, fresh out of the box in the Alienware m15 r3
Above: Crucial P5 2TB, fresh out of the box tested with AJA System Test
Control Tests
Trying a different drive…
To verify I wasn’t seeing some general issue with the m15 r3 I grabbed one of my Samsung 970 Evo drives out of the Alienware m15 r2 and tested it in the r3. The result was much for muchness- these drives were bought at the same time with one used as a system disk and one used as a gaming disk. Their usage will have varied, but the results are within a reasonable margin for error from each other. It’s clearly not something wrong specifically with the Alienware m15 r3, but rather with its interactions with other disks.
Above: Samsung 970 Evo tested in Alienware m15 r2
Above: Samsung 970 Evo tested in Alienware m15 r3
Linux…
It also occurred to me to try Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 to be specific) on the m15 r3 so that I had a system free of Windows driver weirdness that could confirm if the SSD weirdness was due either to firmware/controller issues (hardware) or Windows driver issues (software). Not entirely to my surprise I found Linux giving me read speeds of around 3GB/s sustained with a few drops just under. Even testing 1000 reads of 512GB. This clearly implicates some driver level issue that somehow only affects a combination of Windows 10, the Alienware m15 r3 and the Crucial P5 series SSDs.
Of course these tests are not especially comparable to CrystalDiskMark results, so it’s quite possible I’m seeing a false positive correction of the disk performance and it’s some system or firmware level issue with the m15 r3.
Either way there’s clearly some obtuse issue with compatibility here, though I can’t seem to find where to point the finger.
The stock SSD…
The stock Micron SSD that shipped with the Alienware m15 r3 is pretty tragic compared to its high-performance contemporaries, but isn’t all bad. It’s clear that whatever issue plagues the P5 in this particular configuration, it doesn’t affect Micron’s less fancy drives.
Above: Stock Micron drive tested in Alienware m15 r3
Hot, hot, hot
If you plan to use the Crucial P5 in a laptop you will want to make sure you get a full complement of heat spreaders for your drives. Running the P5 without any kind of heat spreader quite considerably impacted sustained performance. I noticed a significant drop in speed when copying 200GB of Xbox Game Pass games from the 1TB disk over to the 2TB one. The 1TB – with heat spreader – remained around 65 degrees, while the 2TB without tended to hit 75 very quickly. CrystalDiskMark tests immediately after this bulk copy and before allowing the disk to fully cool revealed throughput of around 1GB/sec read and 880MB/sec write. Ooof.
Alienware are still shipping laptops with heat spreaders installed only on pre-installed drives, I noticed this both in my r2 and r3 which both shipped with one 512GB stock SSD that I immediately replaced and stowed away for emergencies. This stock drive came with a heat spreader installed, but additional spreaders for the extra bays (1 additional bay in the r2 and two additional bays in the r3) are nowhere to be found.
To be fair most workloads don’t necessitate copying 200GB of data from one disk to another, so this may not be a dealbreaker but you really should grab those heat spreaders to get the best out of your drives. If you’re buying for a desktop system then a heatsink should suffice- really you’re just looking for something to give the disk enough thermal mass to survive short bursts of sustained use that might occur when loading a game, rendering a video, copying files or running “npm install”.
Some of my more aggressive benchmarks (not on these SSDs mind) actually required me to take the bottom off the laptop and point a fan directly at the SSD. With games getting bigger and the “next-gen” titles expecting near continuous, high performance streaming of assets from disk, active SSD cooling could be an important addition to the gaming laptop space.
Crucial’s Magic Momentum Memory Caching
I’d like to say good things about Crucial’s Momentum driver for their SSDs. On paper it’s a good idea to use remaining system memory as a memory buffer for SSDs, and in a battery-backed system like a laptop there is, in theory, little chance of data loss. In practise, however, enabling Momentum Cache threw me into a nigh-on inescapable Windows 10 repair loop. It was only upon following these bizarre instructions specified by Ron on Microsoft Answers that I was able to boot the system and finally see Momentum in action. Not a good start.
Things took a turn for the better when actually benchmarking the memory-boosted storage, however. In my case sequential read/write speeds shot up to 8GB/s with dramatic performance increass all across the board.
With 32GB RAM in the Alienware m15 r3 it was very tempting to leave this caching enabled, but having read that it potentially causes issues with anticheat software (ugh) and being just a smidge afraid of spontaneous data loss I lost my bottle and opted to leave it disabled.
Since RAM caching only affects “hot” data that’s being read/written repeatedly there are few practical implications for this performance increase. Since CrystalDiskMark creates and reads files in a short period of time, it makes sense that they would stay in RAM and give an unnaturally positive outlook on caching. It may be more useful for increasing the endurance of your SSDs- something that has thus far not been a problem for me- than increasing performance. Tasks such as compiling software projects may see more immediate benefit from this caching and if I can summon the courage to enable Momentum Caching again I’ve certainly got some significant software projects that would be worth A/B testing the compile times of.
Conclusion
While this mystery remains unsolved you would be forgiven for avoiding Crucial P5 series SSDs for ugprading your Alienware m15 r3, but in spite of these findings the day to day performance of the SSDs is… fine. I don’t notice any practical difference between performance on my r2 with Samsung 970 Evo SSDs and the r3 with Crucial P5 SSDs.
The P5 is clearly Crucial’s answer to the 970 Evo and Evo Plus but, with both the price and performance keeping pace, it will be difficult to convince the average aftermarket upgrader to forego the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” choice of Samsung.
Until I’ve run these SSDs into the ground I can’t stick my neck out and be the one to say “It’s fine to pick Crucial” but Micron SSDs seem to find their way into plenty of OEM builds and while SSD failures are inevitable there doesn’t seem to be the crises of crashes that gamer Samsung proponents would have you believe plague other manufacturers. So- I’ll happily say “pick these with confidence” and with any luck you’ll have forgotten who said that if they ever fail.
On the subject of the weird benchmark figures… I’ve lodged an ongoing tech support query with the right person at Dell and it’s being looked into.
The M15 R3 has, surprisingly, a 2230 SSD slot generally reserved for data storage. It’s a welcome addition to Alienware’s M15 R2 successor that offers the opportunity to install a bonus extra disk for dual booting Linux or archiving media files, downloads and other less pressing data.
Finding a 2230 SSD, however, proved to be somewhat difficult. Availability is so sketchy that Surface Laptop owners were pulling the Kioxia SSD out of a CalDigit Tuff Nano in order to upgrade their machines. With the Surface Laptop Go also now presumably sporting a 2230 format SSD the demand for these tiny disk upgrades is only going to get bigger. I had to reach out to Kioxia for a KBG40ZNS1T02. This tiny 30mm SSD offers on-paper read and write speeds of 2,300 MB/s and 1,800 MB/s respectively and the astute reader will notice the “1T” in the drive name does, indeed, correspond to 1024GB of capacity.
The SSD
In a world of 1TB microSD cards I really shouldn’t be shocked by the size of Kioxia’s tiny SSD… or 2230 format SSDs in general- but this thing is TIIINY. It’s really no small wonder that Alienware decided to bung this extra slot into the R3. They had the space to spare and the option of a separate data disk alongside a boot RAID0 configuration is pretty enticing.
Here it is compared to full sized SD and microSD cards. pic.twitter.com/Rb3D443DOs
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
On the top side of the SSD is the memory itself, taking up a majority of the space, with a scattering of passives and ICs- presumably to do with power regulation and conditioning- surrounding it.
Sweet lord almighty this thing is tiiiiinnnnnyyyyy! pic.twitter.com/ZI1O61fEil
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
The bottom is completely blank, save for silkscreen and the distinct outline of copper traces and pads underneath the PCB resist. There are some interesting features that might be related to heat disspation. Just as well- SSDs have a habit of getting hot, and there’s nowhere much for the heat to go on this tiny, tiny disk.
Has a little ASCII picture of a spider on the back. Hey little guy! pic.twitter.com/UsF9ekt0rP
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
Installing into the Alienware M15 R3
Fuelled by my inability to estimate exactly how long 3cm might be, I quickly ran into a problem installing the Kioxia 2230 into my Alienware laptop. The slot, while labelled 2230 SSD3, is either a 2245 slot or something non-standard.
Apparently so!
Though looking at this photo compared to the size/shape of the actual 2230 SSD does not fill me with confidence.
Nothing a bit of blue-tac can’t fix… pic.twitter.com/bkSJecYREO
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
It seems deliberately designed to make it impossible to install a 2230 SSD without an additional bracket- perhaps because it’s necessary for cooling, or maybe another screw post simply couldn’t go where that enticing white dot is placed because there’s something exciting on the other side of the motherboard. I’m not sure.
Suspicion confirmed…. uh @Alienware your m15 r3 2230 slot has a nice white dot exactly where a screw should be…. pic.twitter.com/vC5gWdN4fO
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
Stubborn as I am, however, I decided to forge ahead and install the SSD anyway. There’s enough friction on the socket for it to stay put without a screw… although I was hesitant to keep it this way. Nothing a bit of 3M tape couldn’t fit- at least to get things up and running.
Had to employ a little artistic license to secure the tiny Kioxia 2230 SSD into the ostensibly 2230 SSD slot on my @Alienware m15 r3… but… IT’S ALIVE. IT’S ALIVE! pic.twitter.com/vkzLnzwFjO
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
Quest For The Bracket
What I actually needed was a specific bracket-and-heatsink doodad which would securely screw onto the SSD and, in turn, secure the SSD down to the mainboard.
Ah! From the @Alienware m15 r3 service manual.
Is it *really* a 2230 slot if it requires an additional part that’s not supplied!?
Also… I wonder if a 2242 SSD would fit. Pretty sure I have a SATA one inside my tiny VAIO. Heck of a chore getting it open though. https://t.co/Fpjfy9lMHspic.twitter.com/uWmwRVJhVW
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 6, 2020
Unfortunately Dellienware still don’t supply the extra sundry brackets and heat spreaders required to fit every unpopulated SSD in a new machine. This frustrates me enormously, since they’re tricky and unreasonably expensive for a regular customer to identify and purchase. The part I needed is the “CN-08F83M.” At time of writing… Google has nothing on this and Dell’s own website doesn’t serve me any better.
Fortunately in this case Dell had my back and supplied me with a bumper pack of all-the-brackets and heat spreaders to get a full complement of SSDs up and running in the Alienware M15 R3. They even included a bracket to fit a 2230 SSD into a 2280 slot which will prove extremely useful for testing this SSD in a less potentially bottlenecked slot.
Powering up the @Alienware m15 r3 with some much needed heat spreaders for the Kioxia 2230 SSD and the secondary Crucial P5. pic.twitter.com/Ytm93tgrtG
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 22, 2020
Testing The SSD
Since I was waiting on a bracket/heat spreader from Dell for much of my early tinkering with the Kioxia SSD I had to get a little creative during benchmarking. Like the other SSDs installed in the Alienware the poor Kioxia had trouble with shedding excess heat. It’s clear that performance laptops need some active cooling involved with their SSDs, or SSDs need to start running cooler. I honestly dread to think what happens inside something like a Surface Laptop Go, but I suspect less heat from the CPU/GPU and a less performance workload might not push it quite so far.
To get the best results out of benchmarks I used forced-air cooling- a small battery powered fan that forms the base of a wacky-waving-inflatable-tiny-tubeman.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh pic.twitter.com/P8rj22eRyb
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
This allowed me to hit Write/Read benchmarks of 709MB/s and 1572MB/s in AJA System test.
And here’s the test with overkill cooling. While the write speed hasn’t improved by all that much, read has gone WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY up because the SSD is no longer roasty toasty during the read phase. pic.twitter.com/B6A53DYqkB
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 4, 2020
Alienware M15x Ssd Upgrade
For an auxiliary disk (or something in a basic laptop) this is pretty good and far, far exceeds the performance you’d see from eMMC. You would, however, be forgiven for thinking it’s not up to snuff for a boot disk in a performance system. And you’d be right. I set up the Alienware m15 R3 with 1TB and 2TB boot/storage drives in the 2280 slots and the 1TB Kioxia SSD as a dual-boot Ubuntu Linux disk. Since my workflows in Linux are less concerned with disk throughput (I’m not loading huge videogames) then this lower performance is not noticable. Additionally I think the failure to hit Kioxia’s posted sequential write/read numbers here might be in no small part due to the 2230 slot being bottlenecked. The Core i9 simply runs out of PCIe lanes since the notebook CPU has only 16 and 8 of those are connected to the discrete GPU. If you’re counting, the remaining 8 are split between three SSDs.
With the SSD and heat spreader installed properly, Ubuntu Linux installed and the system booted into Ubuntu I saw slightly faster read speeds- up to 1.7GB/s from 1.5GB/s. These benchmarks aren’t exactly comparable but the 512MB sample size in the linux disk benchmark gets us closer to Kioxia’s theoretical maximum sequential read speed and performance is very consistent.
Thermal throttle bgone pic.twitter.com/0KxRbGzwnE
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) September 22, 2020
Alienware M15 Ssd Slot Upgrade
In Conclusion
It’s evident I have more testing to do with Kioxia’s KBG40ZNS1T02 and I’m hoping the latest wave of ultra-compact laptops using this form-factor of SSD will give me some fodder for this. Additionally, re-testing this drive in a 2280 slot without the potential bandwidth limitations that the Alienware M15 R3’s imposes on its third SSD slot could notch benchmarks closer to Kioxia’s stated maximums.
Alienware M15 Ssd Upgrade
First impressions are good- though- it’s a huge SSD to stick into an auxiliary slot and grants the Alienware M15 R3 a responsive Ubuntu Linux dual boot that doesn’t sacrifice the typical Boot/Games SSD configuration of the primary 2280 slots.
Alienware M15 R3 Ssd Slots
The big stickler? Actually obtaining one of these SSDs as an end-user seems to be a little tricky right now. Stay tuned for more!