OK so Microsoft have released another set of firmware updates which are always welcome. I’ll admit I installed them and haven’t noticed a great deal of difference although possibly there maybe an improvement in battery life. Jury’s out on that but it’s a definite possibility. I am a heavy user with several VMs regularly running under Hyper-V in the background, usually a DC plus an SCCM server with all the roles installed and maybe a workstation client too. I am used to bad battery life and I think it may have improved.
I digress. I’m sure there’s plenty of extra stability goodness included in the new update but I am here (unapologetically) for a moan. This post is really an update on my previous Surface post (http://www.simonbond.net/?p=226) regarding the Samsung SSD. If you’ve not read it already then I suggest you do but the crux of it is this: the Surface 4 usually comes with a Samsung SSD which by default has fairly slow write times. When I say slow, up to 150 MB/s. For an SSD on a laptop type device this is rubbish. I explain in the linked post that this can be fixed with a driver update (and I have published a new link to this driver as it no longer seems to be accessible from the Samsung site). In any case here is my issue: The new update pack (May 2016) seems to revert the write speeds back to default , ie sub 150 MB/s.
Not sure what’s going on here but if you re-run the firmware update we’re back in business. Might be something to think about testing for all future firmware releases.