I’m Chinese so my English is not very well, but I hope my solution can help you improve the speed of ssd .
Before I bought this tablet, I found some information about core M3-8100y. Intel just tell me it supports pcie3.0 with 10 lanes, there is no more information able its SATA controller. But for N4100,it also support SATA3.
When I search the review and benchmark of CHUWEI UBOOK PRO N4100&M3,it seems like their SATA Controller all work at SATA2@3Gbps.It’s very strange because using sata2 can not save any cost for CHUWEI.
By a chance, I entered the BIOS and got it——the reason why they work at sata2 is SATA Controller Speed is set as gen2.
Just reboot your tablet and press Esc to enter BIOS, then switch gen2 to gen3.Now your ssd can run double speed than before.
As for the socket of ubook pro m3, it seems like a M.2 with m key for UBOOK PRO M3,because I saw NVMe information in BIOS; N4100 don’t support pcie3, so I assume it uses a b key socket,
you can try to switch SATA Controller to gen3(if there have this setting), and if you want to upgrade ssd, please buy a M.2 SATA SSD.
Thanks for the information. I changed mine from Gen2 to Gen3. I am not sure if there is any speed improvement but it does work fine. I am surprised it was not default set to “Auto”.
One question. Did you change the “SATA Mode Selection” from AHCI to Intel RST Premium? If so, why?
Gen2 is 3Gbps and Gen3 is 6Gbps, but even a ssd working at 3Gbps is much faster than emmc&HDD, so you may not feel any improvement; if you want to copy files or do something need faster SEQwrite&read and 4K write&read, they will show much difference.
As for the SATA MODE, it doesn’t matter. I am using RST because I think it can help me to switch to SATA3 from SATA2 at the beginning.If you are using ACHI, there is no truly difference between them in performance, let it be ACHI.
Why not you use crystal disk mark and test whether are you having Sata 3 speed? If it is indeed sata 3, you should be getting 400MB/s to 500MB/s. Someone did mentioned Netac SSD is capable of doing much higher speed but when operating under Sata 2, the speed will never hit above 300MB/s
Here are the Crystal Disk Mark scores for each SATA Controller Speed setting:
Gen2:
Gen3:
Auto:
The sequential R/W speeds are double from the Gen2 to the Gen3/Auto settings. The Random R/W speeds are not really affected by the setting. Also, there is not much difference between the Gen3 and Auto settings.
With this data, I think either choosing Gen3 or Auto would be recommended.
So the factory probably didn’t bother to do a proper configuration cos in real life, they think we won’t see much of a difference unless we really running benchmark.
Just to update, I went into my bios (N4100) model, but couldn’t see the option on Sata Controller Speed. In fact the Sata options under, South Cluster Configuration seems to be quite different from the above screenshot. So the Sata 3 option probably limited to 8100y ver only.
