How To Install Windows On A PCIe SSD

The 3.1 series of ASRock mother boards have all of the UEFI/BIOS updates that the original/non-3.1 version of the same board has.

You can tell by the date of the initial release UEFI of the 3.1 version of the board, which is newer than the majority if not all of the UEFI versions of the non-3.1 version board.

Your board has a Beta UEFI/BIOS release.

I have an X99 Extreme6/3.1 board, which also has but one UEFI version available, plus two Beta. I use an Intel 750 NVMe SSD as the OS drive with that board.

I'm sure an NVMe SM951 would work with your board, as an OS drive too. You'll need to learn how to install Windows in UEFI booting mode, and you must use Windows 8.1 or 10, since those versions only have a native MSoft NVMe driver. I don't think the 950 Pro's NVMe driver will work with the NVMe SM951, unless something has changed in the new version from Samsung.

Numbers you say, what was I thinking... let's see what I've got here:



I'm not sure if you had the Sammy NVMe driver installed when you did your RAID 0 testing, but I had a surprise (not really) after I installed Win 10 on this volume. All I did was load the IRST 14.8 F6 driver during the installation, which made the RAID 0 array visible to Windows.

After Win 10 booted and I was installing basic drivers, I ran the Samsung NVMe 1.1 driver installer. "No Samsung NVMe SSDs connected", or close to that message. The usual Samsung non-support of RAID.

So what driver am I using? Only IRST. I have no other entries in Device Manager, such as under Storage Controllers, for the Samsung NVMe driver. I don't see anything that is an entry for the MSoft NVMe driver. Under Disk drives there is the Intel RAID 0 Volume, and nothing else for the 950s.

Since the 950s are in a RAID 0 array, the only places in the UEFI I can see this drive are in the IRST entry in the Advanced screen, and the entry in the Boot screen and Boot Manager. Nothing is shown in System Browser once the 950s are in a RAID array.

I tried the Beta UEFI 2.31 which adds an "NVMe Configuration Item" for the 950 Pro. That UEFI will list the 950(s) as an entry in the Advanced screen, but once they are in a RAID array, that listing is gone.

Another side effect is I don't get a temperature listing for the 950's in HWiNFO once in a RAID array.

Just as you noticed, the Read scaling is poor compared to the Write scaling. Again, the RAID 0 random IOPs are reduced in RAID 0 compared to a single 950 Pro. In use it boots from the POST beep in the usual 2 - 3 seconds, seems like a limit in Windows. The IRST 14.8 Release Notes include listing a bug with poor performance when RST PCIe Storage Remapping is Enabled, as fixed in 14.8. IMO, no, the performance issue has not been fixed.

Anvil results are interesting:









The single 950 Pro high queue depth results are better than two in RAID 0. That was not the case with SATA SSDs. There's an obvious reason IMO why this is true, but I don't see it yet.

I decided to try installing Windows 10 on a RAID 0 volume of Samsung 950 Pro PCIe NVMe SSDs. A few ASRock board users seem to be having difficulty with that, so I had to see for myself.



This is on my ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ board, two 256GB Samsung 950 Pros. I had no trouble with the installation itself, and I did not do anything basically different than I described in my procedure at the beginning of this thread. So it is certainly possible to install Windows 10 on a RAID 0 volume of 950 Pros. I'm using that PC now to write this post.

I'm writing up a step by step guide on how to do this, which I will add to this thread soon.

My scenario was a bit different, hopefully this helps somebody

Edited by peroni - 18 Jan 2016 at 4:26am

Intel's NVMe driver installation package for their 750 SSD and related Intel NVMe SSDs contains an F6 type driver set in a Windows folder.

This package also contains a Windows installer program that uses the same NMVe driver files.

Intel provides support for Windows 7 with their NVMe driver package, while Samsung so far has not.