Hello
I was wondering if it is possible to install a Samsung 950 Pro ssd with a M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter into a Asus P6T6 (X58) motherboard and have it bootable with windows 10 64bit?
Thanks
@MUGEN :
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
Unless your Intel X58 system detects the Samsung SM950 automaticly due to the ROM module, which has been flashed into the SSD by Samsung, I don’t see any chance for your X58 system to be able to boot off the NVMe SSD.
All available NVMe mainboard BIOS modules are EFI ones, but cannot be used by your system, because it doesn’t have an UEFI BIOS.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
After a few day’s of research I come to the conclusion to just buy a PCIE 2.0 X2 Sata III controller and run my 512GB 850 pro in rapid mode and call it a day. Nothing I found can match the speeds I’ve posted below once rapid mode is enabled and they will be even better once I plug the SSD into a Sata III port. 2 ssd’s in raid 0 wasn’t an option because my board doesn’t support trim and raid(X58) and rapid mode doesn’t work with Raid. I’ve run 2 256gb Corsair P series(samsung) SSD’s in raid 0 for 5 years straight with no raid/garbage collection and they slow down pretty fast. The few PCIE SSD’s that are available that would work with my MB probably won’t last like a samsung ssd and are still slower than a 850 pro in rapid mode.
256gb 850 Pro installed in Sata II X58 port with Rapid mode speeds from samsung magician performance test:
Sequential Read=4,998
Sequential Write=4,748
Random Read=165,487
Random Write=111,564
PS. the answer I received from samsung about my original question “Yes it is possible, but you may run into compatibility issues with adapter and the 950 pro, and we do not provide support for adapters.” Also the 950 pro doesn’t support Rapid Mode and samsung has no known information that they are going to enable it for this SSD.
@MUGEN :
It is wellknown, that users get excellent benchmark results while running a Samsung SSD in RAPID mode, but what you mesaure is not the speed of the SSD, but the speed of your RAM.
I have tested the RAPID mode with my Samsung 840 PRO SSD and couldn’t detect any performance gain while doing my daily work.
Just saw this and guess what, I’m bored. So I have a spare system with an Asus P6T Deluxe v2 and was wondering what PCIE 2.0 x2 Sata III controller you got for your system MUGEN? How has it been running for you? Or Fernando do you know of one for this mobo that would be good?
I have a couple SSD’s: a Samsung 840 and an 850 laying around. I think I need a new project and this sounds like right up my alley.
One thing is that in the 1st PCIe 2.0 slot I have a video card installed, would putting the controller benefit in the 2nd slot below or how about the PCIe x4 at the top? I would just connect the SSD to the controller and then the spinny can stay on the Intel ports on the board.
I went with this controller card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as…N82E16816124062
I haven’t run into any major problems running my 850 Pro 2TB with rapid mode turned on and windows 10 64bit. Speeds are around 500mbs without rapid mode. If I use any syba drivers in windows 10 I no longer have the option to optimize the drives inside windows 10. The built in windows drivers allow me to optimize the drive on the sata III controller card.
If you just have a video card in the first PCIE 2.0 slot and the other 2.0 slots are empty I would put the sata III controller card in the bottom/black PCIE 2.0 slot so you get better speeds than the PCIE slots. I have the luxury of 6 PCIE 2.0 slots and only 2 devices in them.
My X58 build PC is still running strong after 7 years and I have no plan on getting rid of the the CPU/MB. The GPU is the only thing that I would even consider upgrading, but it has a GTX 980Ti already, maybe a GTX 1080Ti if it does 4k at 60fps in games
.
Thanks for the info, will order one. I have a newer system, but hard to let go my old X58 with 920 DO. Still runs hard and game on it occasionally. It’s got Windows 7 64-bit on it and will maybe stick to that.
Noticed it has a Marvell controller, I got some spare SSD’s by Crucial laying around, maybe I will run those through it as well. Anything special in the BIOS to set?
Again, thanks for the info
You just have to select the drive on the PCIE 2.0 controller card as your boot hdd and you should be all set.
EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded parts of the fully quoted text removed (to save space)
So got the card in today and installed. Went like a breeze as you mentioned. I did notice a small quirk: I don’t see any hard drive activity via the computer case light. No lights when I launch programs or when I send a trim command. I use HD Sentinel to let me know if trim is active and also ran the command and both said that trim is on. Just noticed
Other than that for 30 something dollars I do get a few seconds of speed increase. Programs do launch about 1-3 seconds faster and they are much snappier. Boot time is like you said, a bit longer by maybe about 5-7 seconds. I need to try system images to see if it can saturate the bandwisth of the Gig lan some more. On the SATA 2 port I was watching my imaging software and I was transferring around 200-40Mb/s so I will do one in the coming days to see if I can get that higher like my other systems which are around 600-800Mb/s per the software.
Again, thanks Mugen for your help and input.
Hdd activity works fine on my pc, I have the LED connected to the MB. I can confirm that TRIM works this card in windows 10 64 bit with the trim test that is posted in this forum.
Just FYI the 950 Pro works on X58. I am booting Win10 64 bit on a GA-X58A-UD3R. If you search the internets you’ll see many others also reporting success. The thing is, Samsung brilliantly put in a legacy-compatible option ROM that allows the X58 BIOS to recognize the drive (unlike the SM951 which I also have). I am getting 1600+ / 1500+ MB/sec read/write with no tweaking or Samsung NVMe driver. This is limited by the PCIe 2.0 bandwidth. However my plan is to buy a second adapter card for the SM951, put it in an open x16 slot, and software-RAID between the two to break that barrier. The 950 is already partitioned into a 64 GB (non-RAID) boot and a 448 GB partition for future sw RAID, so I should have almost 1 TB 3 GB/sec secondary drive, on a 6 year old motherboard.
Couple major caveats. On this particular motherboard, I had to downgrade the BIOS to the previous version, latest seems to hang when the 950 is installed. Newest hitch is I cannot enable built-in Intel SATA RAID or the BIOS fails to recognize the 950 is bootable. Which is too bad because I have 2x 8 TB Seagate Archive drives I was planning to RAID, possibly with 2 more for 16 TB RAID 10. Might have to buy a PCI-e RAID card if I cannot solve this (it is more valuable to me to have the solid state boot drive than to use the built-in RAID for mechanical storage drives).
@mn1 :
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum and thanks for your report. It is great, that you were able to get the Samsung 950 NVMe SSD working with your old X58 chipset system!
Have fun with your old ICH10R mainboard in combination with the newest NVMe SSDs.
Dieter (alias Fernando)
can i run M2 SSD in Intel db75en?
Does it require any special driver?
It may depend on the SSD model. Some of them have an NVMe Option ROM within their chip. The insertion of a suitable EFI NVMe module into the BIOS into an Intel mainboard BIOS and the flashing of such modded BIOS will be very difficult and risky.
It depends on the OS you are running and the SSD model.
Update: Software RAIDing a 950 Pro + SM951 on an X58 motherboard worked. I had to jump through some hoops due to wanting to keep one partition outside the RAID as a boot drive, but it is possible via virtual hard drives + Storage Spaces + command line (to force RAID 0 / striping). Now I am getting around 3200-3300 MB/sec read, 3100-3200 MB/sec write, on this 8-year old chipset! In theory more drives could be added, there are many slots on this motherboard…