Samsun 960 on an older fatal1ty x99?

Know what. I am not 14 any more. I just do not have the time to tweak settings. I have been at this for 5 or so hours. I think it is clear m.2 is just too immature, and no one should be recommending this chip on unproven boards. To my internet counterparts trying to decide if you should but this or something else. Save your money. I am going back to PC microcenter and getting a 1080 instead.

wardog wrote: An 850 EVO would perform at speed in a standard M.2 slot w/o loss.

Thus they get their lanes from the PCH, as they are shared with the normal SATA ports

wardog wrote: An 850 Pro would need the Ultra M.2 slot to perform at speed.

The Ultra M.2 gets it's lanes directly from the PCIe bus and as such is much faster. But, again, it does consume resources. 4 PCIe lanes of whatever your CPU is capable of providing

With it in the Ultra M.2 slot:

Go into the BIOS > CSM > and set Launch Storage OpROM Policy setting to UEFI Only
Save and Exit, Rebooting
Re-enter the BIOS

I have the bios updated. Everything except my top video card and RAM is uninstalled. The graphical hardware map does not show anything. Launching windows via disc does not show anything. Saw some posts where it said it try to install f6flpy driver, windows did not accept it. There is some nonsense yammering about windows on a thumbdrive, which I do not have, just the disc.

l4nce0 wrote: That's the issue with these new slots. People are not consistent with the acronyms.. I remember the same confusion when PCI-e video cards came out

Actually, the few people like yourself that want to use the correct terminology, like M key and B key, are basically ignored by the manufactures of these drives. I assume the manufactures think using the M and B key terms confuses buyers, when that is unnecessary in most cases, and may prevent sales. People would see the 'M' or 'B' key spec and wonder, as you did, if their board's M.2 slot supports the key type of the drive. Most M.2 ports are B and M compatible, but some aren't. You're fine, and as long as you know the M.2 slot supports PCIe/NVMe (M) and SATA (B), those terms are more self explanatory.

There is more to the confusion than the acronyms. A few early, pre-NVMe PCIe SSDs like the Samsung XP941 and SM951 (non-NVMe version) and Plextor M6e are not SATA M.2 SSDs. They are M key, but their built in controllers use the standard Microsoft AHCI driver, and again are not NVMe SSDs.

Simplified, M.2 SATA SSDs are B key. All other (current) M.2 SSDs are PCIe (obviously not SATA) either NVMe or AHCI, and M key.

You can tell if an M.2 drive is M or B key by looking at it, M key SSDs have two notches in the connector, while M key SATA SSDs only have one notch. Examining the M.2 slot itself is not at all as easy to tell if it B, M, or both.

If we really wanted to be unnecessarily specific, SATA connections are really based on PCIe 2.0 lanes, internal to the chipset that supports SATA connections. But since those lanes are not available for other uses, referring to them as SATA is the best method.