DeskMini 110: hard drive compability

bogon wrote: I just noticed http://www.asrock.com/nettop/AVL/DeskMini%20110%20Series.pdf I ordered a Samsung 850 Evo, and even though it's not on the list I've seen others have had success, so I'm not worried about that one. But I'm wondering if these 3 new drives will be compatible*: Seagate FireCuda 2TB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179110 Samsung 960 Evo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147594 Samsung 960 Pro: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147596 * forum was breaking links, so i needed to add them as plain text

Don't worry about the forum link tool, it's not you. Any URL that has a '?' in it get ruined by the tool. Thanks for testing your links first.

As long as the drive will physically fit in the DeskMini's case, it will work. That is, for non-M.2 drives, as long as it is a 2.5" drive and is 7mm in height, as that Seagate FireCuda is, it will fit and work.

That Seagate is a SATA SSD, so will work in any board that supports SATA, as the DeskMini does. For SATA drives, the Storage Support List confuses people more than it helps them. Have we ever had to worry about a SATA drive being compatible with any board that supports SATA? No, and we shouldn't need to worry about that.

But the DeskMini PC has physical size restrictions for SATA drives. They must be 2.5", and I know 7mm "Z-height" drives will fit. There are 9mm Z-height 2.5" drives, which I need to check if they will fit. So just be careful of the physical size of a SATA drive.

M.2 drives have different sizes too, their length is the only physical restriction, currently. The DeskMini will accept all the standard M.2 lengths, with 80mm being the maximum. 99% of current Samsung and other M.2 SSDs are 80mm maximum, which is given in the M.2 form factor for the drive, 2280 for example. Yes, 22mm is the width of these SSDs, again shown in the 2280 form factor.

The two new Samsung 960 models are both NVMe SSDs. Just like SATA is a storage drive protocol, so is NVMe. Any NVMe SSD will work* in ANY mother board, as long as you can install its NVMe driver, or use the inbox, built in NVMe driver in Windows 8.1 and 10. Windows 7 and 8 require you to install an NVMe driver during the Windows installation .

*Work needs one bit of explanation. In order for an NVMe SSD to be used as the OS/Boot drive, the board's UEFI/BIOS must have NVMe support. As implied above, an NVMe SSD can be used as a data drive on any board, but use as an OS drive requires NVMe support in the UEFI/BIOS. The DeskMini series has NVMe support in the UEFI out of the box, so any NVMe SSD can be used as the OS drive.

If any PCIe M.2 SSD requires specific, special compatibility to be added to a board's UEFI/BIOS that only applies to one drive model, then that drive should be avoided. There are zero NVMe drives like that currently, and anyone that made one like that has made a mistake.

There is one new, apparent exception to this on the horizon. That is the new Intel Optane SSDs, that hopefully will be available in some way** in 2017. So far, they are only compatible with the new Intel Kaby Lake/200 series chipset boards, yet to be released. Optane support will hopefully be similar to NVMe support, meaning once it is added to a board's UEFI/BIOS, it will support all Optane drives. I expect that to be the situation. The question remains if Optane support needs specific hardware support in the board's chipset, which may be true.

**Way, or some way means the first Optane drives will only be small capacity M.2 SSDs, that are meant to be used as a Cache drive, what Intel calls "Accelerating" the system.