SM951 as OS boot device information

Hopefully cloning your 840 to the SM951 NVMe will work getting the Win 10 NVMe driver working with the SM951. You'll be one of the first doing that experiment...

Otherwise, since your 840 Win 10 installation is probably not a UEFI booting Windows installation, with the SM951 formatted in GPT, try this:

In the UEFI, Boot Order screen, scroll down to find the CSM option. Click on that and find the Launch Storage OpROM Policy option. Set that to UEFI Only. Then click Save and Exit in the Exit screen.

On the restart, go right back into the UEFI, and check the Boot screen. If you then see an entry for the SM951 with the prefix "UEFI:", select that as the first boot device. You may instead find the entry, "Windows Boot Manager". If you do, select that as the first boot device. Then save and exit, and see if you boot into Win 10 with your SM951 NVMe.

If that does not work, remember what you did see in the UEFI about the SM951, and we'll take it from there.

Can you post the url where you preordered that NVME please?

IanJM wrote: Thanks for the reply Parsec I went back and relooked at the boot screen - No CSM option - but I looked in "Hard Drive BBS Priorities" The Samsung NVMe drive was in this list - changed to first (sorry should have looked here first pass through) Rebooted fine from the SM951 NMVe drive - I could tell that its quicker than the 840 drive However 1 - BIOS is still not showing any device in the M.2 slots 2 - The Samsung SM951 NMVe is using Microsoft drivers and doesn't appear in the Intel Rapid Storage list Thanks for your help

The CSM option is at the bottom of the Boot screen, you must scroll down to find it. It is clearly shown in your board's manual. You said you have a Z97 Extreme6, correct?

Regardless, if it boots for you now, that's fine.

It is completely normal for any SM951, whether AHCI or NVMe version, to NOT be shown in the Intel Rapid Storage list of attached drives.

You're using an NVMe SSD, not a SSD connected to a SATA port using the Intel SATA controller with the IRST RAID/AHCI SATA driver.

There is no reason for the IRST software to recognize or list an NVMe SSD. Both versions of the SM951 (AHCI and NVMe) have their own controller built into the SSD. SATA SSDs do not have their own controller, so they must use the Intel SATA controller in the Z97 chipset.

(The controller I'm referring to is not the standard SSD controller found in all SSDs.)

You'll find an independent entry in Device Manager for your SM951, whether AHCI or NVMe. Your SM951 is using the Win 10 native NVMe driver, that is normal. You sure don't want it to be using an AHCI driver, since it is an NVMe device. Not that it could use an AHCI driver.

The AHCI SM951 is also not recognized by the Intel SATA controller for the same general reasons.

Your board also has four SATA ports provided by two ASMedia 1061 SATA controllers. Would any drives connected to those SATA ports be shown in the IRST list of drives? No, they are separate SATA controllers.

The only thing that seems off is the SM951 not being seen in the Ultra M.2 slot. My AHCI SM951 is shown in the UEFI on my Z97 Extreme6 board, so perhaps it is the NVMe aspect of your SM951 that causes that... if that really is the case.

I keep forgetting that if CSM is Enabled, using Fast Boot will remove the CSM option.

The Intel Rapid Storage package has a SATA driver and the IRST UI that runs in Windows. The IRST driver is both a RAID and AHCI driver, Intel considers AHCI to be a feature subset of RAID. Is your SATA mode set to RAID in the UEFI/BIOS?

If you are using AHCI mode, then the IRST UI does not do much for you, except provide information about your drives. The IRST SATA driver is known to perform better than the standard generic Windows AHCI driver, which is msahci in Win 7, and storahci in Win 8 and beyond.

If you use even one standard SATA drive with that board and PC, keeping the IRST driver will provide better performance. You might have noticed in the Performance option in the IRST UI, the Dynamic Storage Accelerator (DSA) setting, which should also be a setting in the UEFI/BIOS Storage Configuration screen, to enable or disable it. DSA works as a performance and a power saving option. You may find the DSA option useful for power savings most of the time, and to increase storage IO performance at other times. DSA does not affect a SM951.

Samsung does not consider either type of SM951 or the earlier XP941 as standard retail products, and they really aren't. Warranty support for these products is normally the responsibility of the seller rather than Samsung. These SSDs are meant for use in high performance laptop PCs, and the laptop manufacture provides warranty support for them to the customer.

Since these SSDs are not retail products (try and find them among Samsung's SSD information on their website) Samsung does not believe they should be supported by the Magician software. The same goes for Samsung's enterprise SSDs, like the 845DC EVO or 845DC Pro, which are also not supported in the Magician software. The 845DC (Data Center) SSDs have their own software similar to the Magician. But the SM951 and XP941 do not.

My SM951 (NVMe) is in the mail (thank you to IanJM for the good URL) and now I hope to do a little future proofing and find either a x8 or x16 PCIe 3.0/M.2 adapter card without software bloating or drivers. So far I've just seen x4 with Addonics and Lycom but I figure this tech may have a little more to offer later on than even the current 2150 read speed benches. If you have clocked yours at 2K and have 4,8, or 16 lane M.2 to PCIe 3.0 adapter card I'd love to check that gear. Any opinions or knowledge on this would be cool too.