@ daemont:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum and thank you very much for your detailed report about how you succeeded at least to get your Intel 750 NVMe SSD bootable on your ASUS Z87 Chipset system.
Enjoy your updated system and this Forum!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Hi. I have MSI Z87 Xpower. Do I have the opportunity to implement support NVMe? Interested in loading Windows with Samsung 950 Pro via an adapter on the PCI-e. Thank you.
EDIT by Fernando: Motherboard model name corrected (as posted separately by Profy13)
Thanks to Fernando and others that take the time to help with questions.
Iāve been researching to learn if I can and how to add NVME boot support on my ASRock Z77 Pro4-M motherboard in order to use my Intel 750 ssd as a boot drive. I currently have it working as a data drive with my Samsung 850 Pro as the boot drive. I formatted the Intel 750 as a UEFI GPT drive and left an empty partition for the Windows 7 install then was able to install the OS on that partition by loading the Intel NVME driver during the install.
I have successfully added the three NVME ffs files to my original Bios as per the instructions in this thread. I used the 3 files I extracted from the ASRock Z97M Pro4 board. However, I kept running into an error which was āfile size is greater than the volume sizeā so to make room I deleted the āIP6Dxeā line item which I found out is the āIPv6 packet I/O serviceā. Does anyone know if I can get by without that item in the Bios? If there is anything else better to delete I would appreciate suggestions.
I sincerely appreciate the help. It feels like Iām getting close!
@ Profy13:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
Probably yes. Accoring to my knowledge it should work with all Intel Chipset systems from 6-Series up, if suitable NVMe modules are present within the BIOS.
I recommend to take the required NVMe BIOS files from an MSI Z97 mainboard BIOS and to insert them (in compressed form) into the latest BIOS of your mainboard.
Before you are going to flash the modded BIOS into the BIOS Chip of your mainboard, you should know how to circumvent the BIOS integrity check of your MSI system.
By the way: I have corrected the motherboard model name within your first post and removed the post, where you told us the correct name. (just to save space within this thread).
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
@ NM Acct:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
How did you insert the 3 files (at once or one after the other, compressed or uncompressed)?
Since you obviously do not want to run your drives in RAID mode, you can remove the BIOS module named "SataDriver" resp. "RaidDriver" without any problem. This EFI module will neither be used nor needed as long as the SATA Controller hasnāt been set to "RAID".
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Thank you. I understand that I need to take 3 modules from the latest BIOS from the z97 Xpower AC? Just do not charge Xpower series of Gaming. In the spirit of her closest z97 Xpower AC. Or is it not important?
It may not be important, but the chances to get suitable EFI modules for your X87 system are better, when the source mainboard model is as similar to yours as possible.
I added each file individually and the error occurred when I tried the largest file, NVME.ffs. I tried saving after each addition then reloading for the next one. I tried compressed and uncompressed. It was only when I removed the IP6Dxe line (2.79k in size) that the NVME.ffs file was accepted.
I proceeded with the BIOS flashing and now have a dual booting machine on a Z77 chipset. Using boot manager I can boot into the ACHI Samsung 850 or āWindows Boot Managerā which is the Intel 750.
Strictly as my opinionā¦I donāt find the NVME setup with the Intel 750 as boot and data drive to be any faster (based on my perception) than the ACHI Samsung 850 Pro (Rapid Mode) as boot drive with the Intel 750 as data drive. And the dilemma is that it will take me a week or longer to tweak the clean W7 install on the Intel drive to what I have now on the Samsung.
At any rate, with the caution that I had to take out one line of the BIOS, I have the NVME boot drive working on an ASRock Z77 Pro4-M board. That is after all the subject of this thread.
As an FYI: Intel just released a firmware update (11/16/15) for the Intel 750 which Iāve also installed.
@ NM Acct:
Thanks for your report. It is fine, that you succeeded and now are able to use the PCIe connected NVMe SSD as bootable drive with your ASRock Z77 mainboard.
You will not recognize the performance gain while writing a letter with MS Word or while surfing in the internet, but you will recognize it, when it comes to video encoding or similar operations with big sized files.
By the way: Although you may get rather similar benchmark scores with a Samsung SATA SSD running in "RAPID mode", these results have nothing to do with the real world. What you have measured is not the speed of your SSD, but the speed of your RAM.
The current drives donāt have a huge noticeable benefit to boot times in some cases a bit worse. I wouldnāt worry about it the difference are usually just a second or two. Here are some numbers I got in anvil comparing the āslowerā 256GB 950 pro and 512GB 850 pro.
850 iops 850 MB/s 950 iops 950 MB/s difference
Seq4MB 128.51 514.02 483.59 1934.36 376%
4k 9292.25 36.3 12538.72 48.98 135%
4kqd4 35694.24 139.43 51417.14 200.85 144%
4kqd16 96577.46 377.26 160409.39 626.6 166%
32k 5736.01 179.25 8922.88 278.84 156%
128k 2548.81 318.6 6054.34 756.79 238%
Seq4MB 119.58 478.34 226.75 907 190%
4k 28125 109.86 46694.71 182.4 166%
4kqd4 77537.03 302.88 82719.98 323.12 107%
4kqd16 87424.15 341.5 83062.72 324.46 95%
That is correct, but the boot time has not much to do with the performance of an SSD.
Users, who just want a short boot time, can take any of the much cheeper SATA SSDs.
Nvidia doesnāt like to drop below 8x for sli especially. Hope they drop it with pascal they have their own bridge that does something like 80GB/s and 16GB if 1TB/s memory!
I have the Samsung 950 pro drive and when I first got it I imaged it from an Intel 750 with Windows 10. I am currently using an Asus Z170 board. When I first booted and ran benchmarks multiple times my 4K IOPS was about 275K, which is not far from the stated performance of 300K. I also used Samsungs latest NVME drivers.
I did a clean install due to other issues and now I cant get above around 210K 4K IOPS. I have installed the Samsung NVMe driver again as well.
One thing I have found interesting, is in device manager under disk drivers it shows āNVMe Samsung SSD 950 SCSI Disk Deviceā. This does not seem correct and from screen shots I havenāt seen anyone elseās labeled as an SCSI device. Am I having driver issues or is this just a firmware or driver problems that Samsung will address in the coming months?
Thanks
@ Sandbagger:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
Since I havenāt yet got access to a Samsung 950 Pro SSD, I am not able to answer your questions upon my own experience.
Maybe you forgot the Write Caching settings from within the Device Manager. For details please look into chapter 8 of >this< thread.
This is just a name of the disk given by the OS and nothing really important.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
is there any way to tell if an NVMe module is already present in the BIOS?
Just open the latest BIOS file of your specific mainboard with an appropriate tool like the AMI Aptio UEFI MMtool and look for the word "NVMe" within the listed module names.
Ok, so it seems like my BIOS has the module by default. 
Motherboard is MSI H81M ECO and am a bit surprised it is there also on the most basic Intel chipset.
hereās the link for download:
http://download.msi.com/bos_exe/7817vW6.zip
might be of some use for some other similar motherboardā¦
Had a look at the size of the modules and are probably closely related to those of the Z97
here are the extracted modules:
7817vW6.rar (18 KB)
has anyone news about ASUS H170M-PLUS support for NVME ?
https://www.asus.com/it/Motherboards/H170M-PLUS/
I canāt find any usefull information around the web.
@ Marchitos:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
We cannot do anything else ourselves (unless a Forum member, who reads your post, has the same mainboard and already solved the problem).
Which NVMe supporting SSD do you want to insert into your system?
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Thank you Fernando!
Iād like to use the new Samsung 950 PRO.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/sā¦o/overview.html