SM951 as OS boot device information

I'll try to answer all your questions and add some suggestions. But first...

Using my Z77 Extreme4 board with the 2.90M UEFI, I've only installed Win 10 on an Intel 750 NVMe SSD. I was successful, and tested it with both an i7-2600K and an i5-3570K. The Intel 750 SSD is an add in card type of SSD that I had in the PCIE3 slot, so you aren't using an incorrect slot. The slot interface being PCIe 2.0 or PCIe 3.0 does not make a difference either, except PCIe 2.0 won't give you the best read speed possible, but the difference is nothing to worry about.

Since NVMe support in the UEFI/BIOS is only needed for an NVMe drive to be used as the OS/boot drive, any NVMe SSD should be able to be used as the OS drive with this board and UEFI version.

All versions of Windows 10 have a built in NVMe driver that is used during the installation, there is no need to install an NVMe driver during the Windows installation. After the OS installation is complete, you can install the Samsung NVMe driver. The NVMe driver is not the problem with your installation.

All drivers are part of an OS installation, they are not put on or written to any other drives except the OS drive itself. When you installed the NVMe driver while running your other OS, the driver was only written to the other OS drive. Sorry but that did not help at all.

Use Rufus again to create the installation flash drive, but be careful to choose:

"GPT Partition scheme for UEFI" for the Partition scheme and target system type.

Be sure to set File System to FAT32.

The File System entry is for the USB flash drive, NOT for the OS drive. It is a very common mistake to set it to NTFS, and may be the main cause of your problem. You chose the "partition scheme" for the OS drive above, which is GPT.

As you have been doing, be sure to select the "UEFI:" entry for the USB flash drive in the boot order when you start the installation.

One more thing you have not done that will insure UEFI booting. In the UEFI/BIOS, find an option called CSM, it's either in the Boot screen, or ACPI Configuration screen. It will be set to enabled, click it to open its sub-options.

Find the Launch Storage OpROM Policy option, and set it to UEFI Only. You'll need to Save and Exit the UEFI/BIOS before it is applied, then go right back into the UEFI and check/set the Boot order for the UEFI:<flash drive name> entry. You should be using a USB port on the IO panel.

That's it, but you should choose a Custom installation in the Win 10 installer, so you can delete any existing partitions on the 960. It should be recognized by the Win 10 installer. Once it is all unallocated space, click on New, which will format the 960. You'll get a prompt about creating partitions, just click Ok. You should get three partitions created. Then just click next and let the install happen. Do NOT remove the USB flash drive until Win 10 finally boots to the desktop for the first time.

Let us know how it goes, good luck!

Thanks for the quick response parsec. 

Edited by Gambit - 07 Feb 2017 at 4:19pm

Hi, 

eComposer wrote: parsec, Hmmmm, maybe a virgin to PC PCIe M.2 arrays, yes... But an old hand since the punch card days... and dealt more with IBM storage subsystems... last I was involved with around 5 years back was the V7000s mainly...  Never ran RAID 0 on those, but certainly leveraged SSDs to help the HDD performance. Also did RAID 0 on HDDs in PCs such as velociraptors, but that's a while ago too.  Have been using SATA SSDs for quite some time straight, not in RAID.  LOL. It took several hours, but I finally got the IRST utility to work.  NO idea why this has been so challenging, but something is amiss... It's funny because I'd downloaded directly from Intel - same install file.  But downloaded a new one from ASRock and reinstalled with that. Now the fun part, LOL.  The Utility shows the RAID 0 arrays as... FAILED!  OMG.  It shows one of the SSDs as being in a failed state.  Yet, everything still seems to be functioning, I would have expected for the array to completely fail if one drive fails in RAID 0. Again, bizarre.  I'm not sure how to check the actual performance of each 960 Evo drive with an alternative, thinking about this. Maybe the drive is faulty?  Fun ride huh?  Appreciate the help, it's great to have someone that knows what they're doing to reach out to - much appreciated!

The failed member of the RAID 0 array is strange, there is no way a RAID 0 array can function with a member missing or failed.

First, go into the UEFI/BIOS, Advanced screen, and at the bottom of the screen list should be an entry for Intel Rapid Storage Technology. Which you may have used to create your RAID 0 array in the first place. That screen will also give you the status of the RAID 0 array.

What does it tell you there?

A reboot may be enough to clear up that problem.

You might want to check that you have the PCIe Remapping options set correctly for the M.2 slots, in the UEFI.

BTW, you will no longer see your 960's in Storage Configuration, the NVMe Configuration, or in System Browser screens, when they are in a RAID array. The only place is the IRST screen in the UEFI.

Also strange the IRST Windows program did not work immediately. As I've said, you must have a SATA drive connected to the Intel SATA ports, or it won't install. I used the IRST 15.2 download from ASRock, but normally the same version from Intel should work, always has in the past. If ASRock tweaked their version, nice job, but that would be very unusual.

I have a feeling all the trouble you apparently had installing the IRST Windows program may have resulted in a bad installation, if it thinks your RAID 0 array has failed. You can run the IRST installer again, which has been known to fix problems. What problems did you have that took hours to overcome?

Did you install the INF files and IME software in your new Win 10 installation? I believe you used the 15.2 F6 IRST driver during the Windows installation, correct?

Just thought, what UEFI/BIOS version are you using on your board? I was told the Intel RAID Option ROM version was updated in a UEFI update for the Z170 Extreme7+. My Z270 board has Option ROM version 15.2.0.2754.

You can check the Option ROM version by running the IRST Windows program, clicking on the Help button, and in that display click on System Report at the top. The second section of information shown includes the Option ROM version, as well as the driver version installed.

I'm also older than you may think. Sorry, but when you said you could not find the IRST software, that told me you were not familiar with IRST RAID. Obviously been a while since you've used it.

Repeating an earlier caution, if you clear the UEFI, or install a new UEFI version, you MUST be sure all the UEFI settings needed for a PCIe SSD RAID array are set correctly again. I did that ultimate test last night with a UEFI update for my Z270 board, and while the good news is I did not lose the RAID 0 array, and one of the required option settings was not changed (RAID mode), I had to set Launch Storage OpROM Policy to UEFI Only again, Save and Exit the UEFI, and go right back into the UEFI again to check the Boot Order entry. It was correct, but I still don't 100% trust PCIe RAID.

eComposer wrote: Hello parsec: I changed the bios to disable CPU overclocking and set the RAM back to default removing XMP 2. Below is the much better performance results: Seq Q32T1 Read 3313, Write 2384 4K Q32T1   Read 531.3 Write 390.2 Seq Read 3337 Write 2341 4K Read 43.01 Write 135.1 Do you know much about optimal BIOS settings, and the effects of overclocking CPU and using XMP 2 for the RAM settings? I'm also unable to locate any information on the IRST utility you mentioned, so am unable to change the SSD caching as you suggested. I can't find the software of any documentation on how to do this. I'd appreciate knowing how to install/access this utility you mention, and pointers to any documentation you know about. Greatly appreciate your help!

Please forgive me, but I now realize you were a complete Intel RAID virgin, that jumped into creating and using a RAID 0 array of PCIe NVMe SSDs as your OS drive. You chose a very difficult thing to do, without any Intel RAID experience.

First, the Intel RAID software is available on your board's download page. It is the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver and utility ver:15.2.0.1020, on the page below, in the Drivers section. If you don't have this software installed, you aren't a RAID user.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z170%20Extreme7+/?cat=Download&os=Win1064

You download, extract, and install it, left click and Run as Administrator. You'll need to restart the PC after the installation. As I said before, you MUST have at least one SATA SSD connected to the board, or the IRST utility program will fail to install. At least that has been my experience in the past.

After that you will find an entry in Control Panel for Intel Rapid Storage Technology. There will also be an entry in the hidden icons of the Task Bar for the IRST utility, which is delay started after Windows boots. Click on either of them and you'll get this display, although it will start off in the Status display:



The screen above is the Manage screen, where you can change the Cache mode. It won't look 100% like this at first. Click on Advanced in blue text to see the caching options and details.

You will (should) find that Write-cache buffer flushing is Enabled. You must Disable that to get the write caching options displayed, as you see above. Then click on the blue Modify, next to Cache mode, which will be Off.

You'll then see the options as shown above. If you want an explanation of each of them, click on the Help button at the top. That will open a new display, with everything you could ever imagine about Intel RAID is documented.

Try Write Back if you like, which gives the best overall performance, at the risk of loosing data if you BSOD of lose power to the PC. You'll be warned about that when you click Write back. Read only gives slightly higher read speeds, without any date write caching to memory. You can change the caching any time you like, any of the options.

So you had improved performance with no OC and stock memory speed. That is curious, I'm OC'd to 4.9GHz and memory is at 3600. I'm wondering if you had CPU power saving options enabled, like C States and Speed Step, which reduce benchmark performance, but it should not have been as much as you had previously. Given the limited information about your UEFI settings, I can't explain that.

CPU usage is minimal during storage IO, but CPU power saving options cause latency that reduces benchmark results. Real world IO speeds rarely if ever approach benchmark results.

Your performance numbers are much better now, you won't get them much higher than they are now.

Tell me, now that you've used your RAID 0 OS volume for a while now, what do you think? I assume you've used SATA SSDs in the past. If you are coming from HDDs, you should be stunned.



Edited by parsec - 09 Jan 2017 at 11:42am