Um obviously just in case you purchase more than one, like I can do with SATA SSD’s. So are you saying raid is being abandoned on legacy bios, but not abandoned on UEFI systems?
Samsung could have built in a accessible raid menu within its firmware controller that launches on the first 950 pro the bios initializes. It would have been a waste of resources IMO considering the legacy bios is slowly dying out, but still perfectly within engineering capabilities, especially for Samsung. So, Samsung will let me boot on a 950 pro but they won’t let me buy two or three of them for Bootable raid unless I use a UEFI based system?
I have two unused PCIe x16 slots ready for some love. Lol
No, I didn’t say that. Even in UEFI systems there is no option to create a Samsung NVMe RAID within the BIOS.
Nevertheless it is possible to create a RAID array by using 2 or more NVMe SSDs, but not by the related Option ROM or EFI modules. Intel offers an RST(e) Console Software, which is able to do it (look >here< within the "Intel NVMe Drivers" chapter), but according to my knowledge only Intel NVMe SSDs and some "Enterprise" chipsets are supported by this feature.
Ah yes that makes sense. It is early in the NVMe technology so probably RAID is not yet developed for consumers. And when it does become available it will probably only be for UEFI systems anyway.
I been looking at these PCIe SSD’s just how I look at any PCIe SSD controller card. But with a single SSD already built in. What I need to do is start looking at them as single stand alone SSD’s that instead use the PCIe bus rather than SATA or SAS. Using such a universal bus as the PCIe is, makes me think more accessible features are possible directly from the SSD’s firmware controller. Even a simple “Powered by Samsung 950 Pro” splash screen would be cool to see. Lol
what’s the point? The Plextor M6e has this splash screen just to say the device is running on PCIe 2.0 x2 and showing the Plextor logo. Only makes boot time longer and the info you also can finde within the OS.
Kingston HyperX Predator don’t has an splash screen.
Nevertheless I belive there are some more differences in the AHCI Rom of the 2 SSD’s because with the Kingston and x58 board it’s not possible to boot in normal way, only with some tricks like an Bootmanager on another SATA or USB device.
Also with HWinfo in the PCI BUS section the Plextor is listed by the correct controller (Device Name: Marvell 88SE9183 SATA AHCI Controller) while Kingston is displayed as Device Name: Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe SSD
Kingston 480 GB is nearly twice as fast as Plextor 256 GB in seq. read/write (1360/930 vs. 720/580 MB/s) but in real operation the Plextor feels much more smoother.
There is no point. I was making a joke about a splash screen. The original point is I was hoping for a raid ROM that would identify more than one installed.
Hello Fernando,
I hope you can help me with this one:
I have a PX-256M6eA-BK PCI-E SSD drive,
and it is incompatible with my mainboard.
The mainboard is the famous
ASROCK X58 EXTREME
which has always this kind of problems…
I have tested many bios versions with no luck. I experiment a reboot loop just after the BIOS screen but before windows loading. I can enter the BIOS, modify and save, and can also see the Plextor card as IDE disk device.
Testing the SSD card in another Pc (X79 mainboard) was successful. I see that at the boot process, a splash screen with the Plextor logo appears briefly. Seems to me that the problem is in that moment - I can’t see the logo with the X58 mainboard, and computer reboots and reboots.
I tried also to update the card; I have firmware version 1.00, but the Plextool application says it cannot find a firmware upgrade…
Can you help me?
I was thinking about modding the X58 bios by removing some unused modules (raid, firewire) which occupy a fixed load location. Maybe some of them is interfering with the Plextor?
I dont’ know if simply deleting those modules with MMTOOL and flashing the modded bios could harm the mainboard.
I’m also waiting for Plextor to respond my support form 
You can downloload the latest firmware 1.05 for this PX-256M6eA-BK PCI-E SSD direct from Plextor or my attached zip file.
Then burn the iso file to a optical Media and follow the steps written in the manual I’ve included to the zip file.
If you like to use an bootable USB flash drive for upgrading the firmware see this page "How to Upgrade Plextor SSD Firmware".
Important make sure your bios is set to AHCI mode in either-way
PX-AG256M6e_1.05.zip (929 KB)
Hello and thanks,
I searched for this but cannot find it on the Plextor website.
However,
when I start the update process,
it finds all the disk devices attached, including Plextor SSD PCIe, but it says “device not matched”.
http://falco75.altervista.org/29072016752.jpg
Your card is slightly different to my “PLEXTOR_PX-AG256M6e” but the firmware file should be the same and can be found here. search by category and select Firmware_ISO.
From Plextor: NAND Flash M6e-BK uses TOSHIBA 19nm Toggle MLC / M6eA-BK uses TOSHIBA A19nm Toggle MLC.
I think you have to wait a reply from Plextor support.
Yes yes I did it.
It only comes out with a couple of utilities and manuals.
I have also found today the ISO you sent me from touslesdrivers, the french site with a lot of this stuff, searching for something, but nothing else came out.
I’m waiting for Plextor response.
What do you think about cutting away pieces of the original MB BIOS?
I think that this issue has something related to that… @Fernando
PS: I just talk with plextor live chat,
and they indicated me to download the firmware and update it.
Too bad it’s the same file I already have 
I’m afraid there is something wrong with this ssd-card and I doubt you will have benefits from a modded bios.
It’s also funny that your M6e-BK is on FW 1.00. If I remember rightly the Black Edition was released with FW 1.05 because the original M6e is more then a year older - read here.
Did you try the bios update with your other x79 system? If the problem persists go and exchange the card, Plextor gives 5 year warranty.
I’m trying with another board to do the update,
this time a brand-new B150 board.
Evertything works but the update is still not working…
I called again Plextor and found out a much smarter technician.
Will send a mail to him, and the issue will be sent to the higher level tech support to see if they can find another “internal” firmware for me.
Still nothing from Asrock.
Some news:
I managed to make the PC start with a strange trick.
If I enter BIOS and make “discard and exit”, the computer boots also with the PCIe SSD connected, and this way I’m out of the reboot loop.
Definitely there is a bug with the bios or the SSD firmware.
I have now another problem:
the card is detected as a boot device and also the speed is ok (over 700 Mb/s read),
but installing Win8.1 gives you a good black screen at the first reboot after installation.
Definitely there is some BIOS >< UEFI incompatibility too.
If I leave the SSD formatted but without any SO installed, it comes up with the normal “MBR not present” or “BOOTLDR missing”, as normal. But with a SO installed it locks up.
I’m trying to bypass also this problem using procedures like this,
http://mrlithium.blogspot.it/2015/12/how…egacy-bios.html
but since now with no luck since I have seroius problems making the USB drive with Tianocore correctly working.
If anybody can help, thanks in advance.
@Fernando still waiting for your opinion on this. 
@Falco75 :
I am sorry, but I am not an expert regarding your special problems.
Hopefully you will get support by anyone else.
Anybody running X58 may want to try what I did to make SM961 boot on X58 (ASUS P6T SE) - see my blog post here https://audiocricket.com/2016/12/31/boot…t-se-mainboard/
Please let us know if it worked for you, so Fernando can then officially create a thread on Win-Raid Forum that running bootable NVMe SSDs on X58 chipset is definitely possible, thanks! 
Great work.
I have tried for some time to refine such a procedure, with no luck,
then I solved installing windows on a normal hard disk, and cloning the windows data partition on the PCIe SSD, leaving the 100Mb boot partition on the hard disk.
Setting hard disk as boot device, it worked like a charm without much effort 
Yeah VERY nice find. Hoping I can give this a try with a 960 and my Rampage III Extreme x58 motherboard.
@mireque :
Thanks for the link to your guide at audiocricket.com and for your efforts to help users with an Intel X58 chipset mainboard to get Windows 10 successfull installed onto an NVMe SSD and to benefit from its performance.
Before I follow your advice and either start a new thread or add some additional informations into the start post of >this< already existing one, I have a very simple question:
Isn’t it possible for all users with a LEGACY mode mainboard to get a modern Windows OS like Win10 installed onto an NVMe SSD, provided that
a) the mainboard has a usable PCIe slot for the NVMe SSD resp. its M.2>PCIe Adapter and
b) the boot sector is located outside the NVMe SSD?
If the answer should be “Yes”, it will be even much easier to solve the NVMe boot problem and the related method should be valid for LEGACY systems with another chipset as well.
The user has just to create a dual-boot system, where the boot sector is on his currently used SATA connected HDD/SSD and will be able to boot thereafter into the OS, which has been installed onto the NVMe SSD (provided, that a suitable NVMe driver is available). Later on the formerly installed OS partition, which is on the SATA connected disk drive, and the related boot manager entry can be deleted with the result, that the user finally has a single-boot system and the OS is on his/her NVMe SSD.
That was exactly the method i used.
-Installing Windows (seven, in my case, my brother preferred to use the older one) on the Hard Drive
-Cloning the hard drive on the PCIe SSD (all the content, both Boot and SO partitions)
-deleted the 100mb partition on the SSD and deleted the SO partition on the hard drive (to create a regular large partition later, leaving the 100Mb Boot unouched)
-selected Hard disk as boot device
-enjoy
I don’t remember having used other strange tricks to make it work. I remembered that many times, when installing Windows on a dual-disk computer with SSD and Hard disk, often windows would install the boot partition on a disk and the data partition on another in a very dumb way, so I used this famous bug as an advantage 
Hi Fernando,
thanks for your reply. I probably understand what you’ve asked. I don’t have any other platform than X58 to try this on, hence it’s aimed at what worked 100% for me. Couple of remarks though (some of it is included in the Prerequisites section):
- The boot sector is on the NVMe SSD (Windows installer does this), but DUET bootable USB stick via DUET accesses the FAT hidden system partition on the NVMe SSD where Windows 10 is installed via provided UEFI driver (NvmExpress-*.efi) and then just executes (= boots) the Windows 10 bootloader (that is \EFI\Boot\Bootx64.EFI image on the hidden Windows partition)
- You need to have a free PCI-e slot for the M.2 to PCI-e adapter
- I have chosen USB 3.0 stick for Windows 10 installation mostly due to performance reasons and for differentiation of system block devices, you can of course also use USB 2.0 sticks to put Windows 10 install ISO on, but then it will be a little bit messed up in the UEFI Shell, and I didn’t want to bother users with guessing game (unless the user is more experienced and wants to play with UEFI Shell) - so using USB 3.0 stick was the most straightforward way for me
- You can use Windows 8.1 Pro too (I have been running it on the same setup before switching to Windows 10)
- It is possible to use the other SATA disk as a boot device, BUT …
- … because I have chosen Windows 10, I currently don’t recommend using any other disk other than the NVMe in the system (especially for bootloaders, maybe as data disks should be fine), because in my experience and that really happened, Windows 10 had simply messed up bootsectors of my SATA drive (and this has been widely documented on the Internet that Windows 10 really act strange sometimes) and the bootloader on the SATA drive just went missing - I couldn’t boot my NVMe from the SATA disk partition, therefore using USB sticks for bootloading seems like a better way - maybe Windows 8.1 Pro should be OK bootloaded from other SATA drive, but I definitely not recommend this for Windows 10 systems for now …
- Also, using other SATA disks may potentionally affect whole system performance, because Windows (even running from NVMe) is accessing those SATA disks - from my experience, I could clearly see difference in boot times when system was temporarily connected with my old SATA OCZ Vertex 2 drives in AHCI mode (as suggested in my tutorial)
- Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 installers do have native NVMe drivers present - theoretically, if the NVMe PCI-e drive correctly implements the basic NVMe standard, it should be usable (of course you can miss some of the performance by not using drivers from the manufacturers)
- I confirm that the Samsung NVMe 2.0 driver works correctly with SM961 under Windows 8.1 Pro / Windows 10 Pro (as others on the Internet rumoured that it doesn’t work - IT WORKS)
I can only recommend other users of LEGACY platforms to try this tutorial and report back. It will be very useful for us to know what works. I personally plan on trying out other NVMe’s like Intel 600p, OCZ RD400 and maybe some Samsung EVO 960… My tutorial is not meant as the defacto standard for booting NVMe’s on legacy systems :), but mostly as a hint for those who want to try it out. I can see users succeed with booting from the other SATA drives, using USB 2.0 sticks as Windows install media, etc - this is only the beginning.
Guys, please do share if you tried it, X58 is still strong enough, even in 2017