Z270 Taichi M.2 Ports

I'd say it's still an asrock issue if people are rma'ing motherboads. Plus asrock lists the ocz rd400 as a compatible device. Now it is their problem

I reached out to OCZ because ASROCK is useless as far as customer support. OCZ has been trying to figure out this issue with me but they dont have a z270 taichi motherboard for testing. THis is what he asked but I do not know the answer.

"M.2 slots can be NVMe or AHCI. If they are using the AHCI protocol for SATA and not NVMe for PCI-e then no the RD400 will not work in that slot.
It might fit in the slot, but it won?™t work.
Is Asrock telling you that all 3 of the slots are NVMe over PCI-e?"

I Returned my second 512gb ocz rd400 to buy a Samsung Evo NVME 500gb which was $219.00 on newegg ocz is still $259.00. I installed the Samsung into my Asrock z270 taichi in the m-1 slot and it works fine. So apparently the oczrd400 can only work in the m-2 slot of this specific motherboard. It is a Toshiba problem.

2bluesc wrote: Sounds like this will be a collection of people pointing fingers. We could look at this technically and try to hypothesize what's wrong since it seems clear that neither party is likely going to do it. It seems incredibly unlikely to me that my Toshibia OEM NVMe drive would be tied to a particular M2 port.  Why would anyone do this? What's the upside to the manufacturers, they already devalue OEM drives by dumping the warranty, why make them more difficult for OEMs to implement?  So, something is wrong with my OEM drive, the OEM drive could be labeled as a freak with special firmware.  But shaun3883 has a retail Toshiba NVMe drive with the exact same problems.  Perhaps with the same controller.  There's another report by a different use on NewEgg with the same problems. Given that the NVMe drives are plugging in to the M2 slot with M edge key, we can narrow down the functions.  Unless someone can produce some documentation regarding M.2 connector context being provided to the NVMe controller about what port it's plugged in to, I assume it doesn't exist because it doesn't make sense. That said we are left with a few things that could be causing issues: 1. PCIe lanes not working.  It could be possible that the PCIe lanes aren't routed or something screwy.  Perhaps the 960 EVO works in a x2 configuration behind the seems in the other ports and the Toshiba TC58NCP070GSB controller doesn't fallback and creates the failures we see.  This would seem odd, but I didn't do any deep digging when I tested my 960 EVO in the other slots other then booting to the UEFI screen to see that it was present.  Has anyone done performance tests comparing the same drive in 3 different slots?  This could be telling. 2. The Z270 Taichi manual lists *no* Toshiba drives.  Why is this?  Is this a known issue by ASRock?  Has anyone on used a Toshbia drive with the same controller on the problematic M.2 ports?  Perhaps it really is a problem with the Toshiba controller.  If this was true, we should see this on other motherboards as well.

Do you have the Samsung Magician software installed? If you do it will tell you what the interface to the 960 EVO is. You should see PCIe 3.0 x4. I've seen 960 EVO users with other boards that only have a PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 interface, and the Magician software correctly shows the interface is a PCIe 3.0 x2 connection. So you can easily verify the actual interface to your 960 EVO without running benchmarks.

Why is a Toshiba OEM NVMe SSD not included in the Storage QVL? Simple, it's not a product sold at retail that is expected to be used in any mother board. I see its relative in the list above, the OCZ RVD400. You know that Toshiba owns OCZ now, right? Both the Toshiba and OCZ NVMe SSDs are the same hardware, that might have different firmware.

The Storage QVL is not 100% inclusive of all NVMe SSDs that exist. The Samsung 960 Pro and EVO drives are not in the QVL of the paper manual, since I don't think they were available when the Z270 boards were initially released. Or ASRock simply did not have samples of those SSDs when the paper manual was printed. Actually, if you check the Storage QVL on the Z270 Taichi's web page, it now includes the 960 EVO.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z270%20Taichi/index.asp#Storage

Do we need a Storage QVL list for SATA SSDs or HDDs? No, since SATA is a standard protocol and any SATA drive should work in any board that provides SATA support. The same is true for NVMe SSDs. If any manufacture made a drive of any type that needed special support from a board, that would be a big mistake.

Next, the M.2 slots on a Z270 board (or Z170, and the other 100 and 200 series Intel chipsets that provide this kind of M.2 support) do NOT use the CPU's PCIe lanes for the M.2 slots. The M.2 slots are connected to the DMI3 lanes in the Z270 chipset, as they are with the other chipset mentioned above. DMI3 is equivalent to PCIe 3.0, and is just Intel's terminology for these lanes within the chipsets. That is why using one of the M.2 slots causes two of the SATA III ports to no longer be available, and vice versa, they share the same resource, the DMI3 lanes. Do you have SATA drives connected to any of the SATA ports that are shared with the various M.2 slots?

If you are using an M.2 to PCIe adapter card in one of these boards, then you will be using the PCIe 3.0 lanes from the CPU. I have an OCZ RD400 that I use in an ASRock Z270 Gaming K6 board, and have used it in both an M.2 slot and in its M.2 to PCIe adapter card, and it works fine. I've only used it in the M2_2 slot, since this board only has two M.2 slots.

I am not aware of any known issue with that Toshiba OEM NVMe SSD, but since it is an OEM drive, how many people remove it from the PC it was sold with, and use it in another? My point is just the number of people that do that is very small.

I'm sure it uses the same controller chip as the OCZ RD400. If your Toshiba NVMe, which is an OEM model and not sold at retail, has different firmware that for some reason causes an issue, who knows? Unfortunately, that Toshiba OEM NVMe SSD is not readily available since it is not a retail product. Why would it be included in any board's storage QVL list, if it is not sold at retail? Or be in the hands of many users of these mother boards?

We don't know what is causing the Toshiba NVMe SSD to not be recognized in some of the M.2 slots. It's not always easy or possible to diagnose an issue without having the PC involved in front of us to experiment with. All we have to go on is what you are telling us.

Was the Toshiba NVMe SSD the OS drive in the laptop? Or just a data drive? It may have special partitions on it that are common on drives included with PCs. Did you move it over as is, or completely reformat it before or after moving it to the Z270 Taichi?

This is from Toshiba technical support.......

"The drive may be incompatible with the other 2 slots, looking at your data, I would say it is.
Why that is the case, I can?™t even speculate. There will not be any updates for the RD400 until we release the new RD500 later this year."