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Does AOMEI Backuper support the new M.2 slot PCIe 3.0 x4 disk drives?

edited February 2016 in AOMEI Products Support

I am thinking about buying the new Samsung 950 Pro disk drive. This drive installs in the M.2 slot on the motherboard and utilizes PCIe 3.0 x4 express lanes which results in read speeds of 1.5 GB/s.

After reading reviews about this disk drive I have discovered that people are finding it difficult to find backup software that will support this drive. One person wrote that Acronis 2015 would not recognize the drive and others have reported similar problems with other backup software.

Does anyone using Aomei backuper have any experience using this disk drive?

Comments

  • Yes, our software support it. But it do not support the 4096 sector disk.

  • I am somewhat confused by your answer. Is the Samsung 950 Pro disk drive a 4096 sector disk and you don't support it or is the Samsung 950 Pro disk drive a 512 sector disk and you do support it?

  • edited February 2016

    here you find information about how Windows handles this:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2510009


    you can see that Windows 8 supports 4K native controllers, and supports 512e.

    The article does not say what WindowsPE for Windows8 does.

    However Windows 7SP1 and WindowsPE based on Windows 7SP1 only support 512e (support 512e in case it is unknown: align 4K-clusters of 512byte sectors on 4K boundaries, on 512 controllers where disks present 4K as 512.).

    Obviously AOMEI does not "support" itself, but relies on whatever Windows or  Windows PE do. I would think that 512e is guaranteed.

    Now it depends on the controller on your m/b, not on PCIE3.0 whether the controller presents a 4K disk as 512 or native 4K to the CPU. (in fact already the 4K disk does this when needed, it emulates 512 when the controller is just 512-capable).

    I tried a  few of my disks internal and USB and all are presented 512 by the controllers, although windows detects most disks are physical 4K, and hopefully does 512e.



  • Thanks for the great reply Peter13feb. Your information was very helpful. Since I am running Windows 10 with a newer motherboard which supports PCIe 3.0 x4 on the M.2 slot I am going to make the assumption that if I include the NVMe driver in the Windows PE build the drive should work properly.


    Thanks again for your help.

  • Just a follow up. I installed a Samsung 950 Pro on my ASRock x99 Extreme 4 motherboard and ran a sucussful backup and restore using WinPE created with AOMEI Backuper Pro. I did not have to add any additional drivers. Great job AOMEI.

  • edited February 2016

    Thank you very much for the report. This tells that the Microsoft NVME driver is contained in Windows10, and it is also in WinPE in Windows10, that Backupper uses for its bootable media.

    It would be interesting to learn whether the controller is 4K or 512, and the method is therefore 4K or 512e. The command to ask is (source: the link in #3)
    Fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x: (where x: represents the drive that you are checking)

    and it shows Bytes per sector and Bytes per physical sector. The command is available in Windows and in WindowsPE.

    There are disputes in the net that Samsungs driver is faster and it is hard to install into PE.

  • "Is the Samsung 950 Pro disk drive a 4096 sector disk and you don't support it or is the Samsung 950 Pro disk drive a 512 sector disk and you do support it?"

    Yes, you are right. If it is 4096 sector, our software do not support it but if it is 512, our software support it.

  • Peter13feb - the command shows bytes per sector as 512 and bytes per physical sector as 512 so it appears the access method is 512e.


    The Samsung driver did not show any increase in performance. I didn't install the driver in WinPE. The people who claim performance increases with the Samsung driver might be running Windows 7. I have read that the install for this drive under Win 7 is real "clunky".

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