new Samsung 980 Pro reported as SSD 980 - what gives??

[Ceph92]

I'm trying to upgrade my precision 3510 laptop to use a Samsung 980 PRO M.2 ssd in win10. It works, and win10 installs on it.
However:

• Both Device Manager and Samsung Magician report this as the lower-end 980 SSD model (no DRAM)
• Magician also reports a compatibility problem: "The device is connected to the Driver that Magician does not support / Intel 17.5.9.1040" which appears to be the "Intel Chipset SATA/PCIe RST Premium Controller" storage controller in device manager.
• Samsung Magician is also unable to get the health status of the drive. It also says this drive doesn't support diagnostic scan, performance optimization, over-provisioning, secure erase, etc

On the other hand:

• serial number reported in Magician mostly matches one on the sticker (there's two)
• Magician benchmark reports: Seq Read 3,271MB/s... Seq Write 2,860MB/s... Rand Read 97,656 IOPS... Rand Write 68,359 IOPS

My first thought was -- have I been defrauded by Amazon or their shadowy vendor? Did someone switch out the 980 Pro with an SSD 980, switching stickers and packaging, and possibly modding firmware?

Before I call Amazon and yell, what do you guys think? Are there other things I should try, first? I've read that this drive might require AHCI, but I don't see a way to enable that for the M.2 / NVMe slot in bios. Is there a way to verify specifications (like, amount of dram)? Maybe I could examine the chips.

 

[Azrak]

I have a 980 Pro 1TB as well.
This is how it displays in Magician (I blacked out the serial number). Note it says "PRO" in multiple places and says "genuine" to the right of the serial number.
I would resolve your "compatibility" issue with the driver before yelling at Amazon or declaring the drive as a fake. It could be that whatever driver it is using now is causing confusion in Windows and Magician.
Why did you buy the 980 PRO? Future proofing for the next laptop? The Intel Mobile CM236 chipset doesn't support PCIe 4.0. The 970 EVO or 970 EVO Plus would have been fine, and likely cheaper.

 

[Ceph92]

Why did you buy the 980 PRO? Future proofing for the next laptop? The Intel Mobile CM236 chipset doesn't support PCIe 4.0. The 970 EVO or 970 EVO Plus would have been fine, and likely cheaper.

For a few reasons. While it won't get the peak transfers of pcie 4.0, most activity isn't peak transfers. As long as the random / worst case / IOPS are still excellent, then it's still worth it (but that might not be happening here). And hoping for lower power consumption, and something I can re-use if I get a new laptop.

 

[Ceph92]

I have a 980 Pro 1TB as well.
This is how it displays in Magician (I blacked out the serial number).

Why did you remove the serial number? What do you have to worry about with publishing that?

 

[SPARTAN VI]

Why did you remove the serial number? What do you have to worry about with publishing that?

Some jerks like to register other people's serial numbers. Most recently, IIRC it's been a problem with EVGA where folks register other people's serial #s to gain EVGA Elite member accounts. IDK if Samsung has anything remotely similar to that, but there's nothing to gain by having your serial# out in the wild.

 

[Ceph92]

So it seems that this drive needs to run in AHCI mode to get full IOPS and support from Magician. In fact, even just to recognize the drive properly you need AHCI. I was upgrading from a Samsung 860 EVO SATA drive which was using RAID/RST (and had some issues with magician).

But I'm also seeing that this brand new drive has 406GB written to it. How did that happen from one win10 install + updates?

 

[ZodaEX]

So it seems that this drive needs to run in AHCI mode to get full IOPS and support from Magician. In fact, even just to recognize the drive properly you need AHCI. I was upgrading from a Samsung 860 EVO SATA drive which was using RAID/RST (and had some issues with magician).

But I'm also seeing that this brand new drive has 406GB written to it. How did that happen from one win10 install + updates?

Windows 10 has a tendency to chew up disk writes at times.

 

[daglesj]

I have tried all the SSD apps from most major manufacturers and I can say this about all of them...they are a buggy mostly useless mess. Detect a drive one boot, not the next, not update the firmware, say there is an update then refuse to install it. List the wrong drive. Make an adjustment and then no longer recognise the drive after. Say this or that function isn't available when it is.

Just total crap the lot of them.