Samsung 960 Pro support

I plan to purchase a 1TB Samsung 960 pro drive when they are available.
Obviously the ASRock Fatal1ty Professional Gaming I7 has not been tested with this drive.

Is it likely that a firmware update will be required?
Perhaps I'm asking for some "crystal ball speculation", but I'm wondering since it's an NVMe PCIe x4 drive whether it would just work since the 950 pro is already supported?

thoughts anyone?



Edited by TanC - 27 Oct 2016 at 9:24am

TanC wrote: I plan to purchase a 1TB Samsung 960 pro drive when they are available. Obviously the ASRock Fatal1ty Professional Gaming I7 has not been tested with this drive. Is it likely that a firmware update will be required? Perhaps I'm asking for some "crystal ball speculation", but I'm wondering since it's an NVMe PCIe x4 drive whether it would just work since the 950 pro is already supported? thoughts anyone?

No reason a 960 Pro won't work. If the board's UEFI supports NVMe SSDs, then they can be used as the OS drive.

There are two ASRock boards with part of their name being "ASRock Fatal1ty Professional Gaming I7".

The only one with a Storage QVL is the ASRock  Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming I7. FYI, the Samsung 950 Pro is not included in that board's Storage QVL list. That also true for the list of M.2 SSDs in its manual.

The ASRock  Fatal1ty Z170 Professional Gaming I7 has a list of M.2 SSDs in its manual, but again the 950 Pro is not included.

But both my and wardog's comments still stand.

I use a 950 Pro in my Z170 Extreme7+ board, and at one time had two in RAID 0 in it. I have two Intel 750 SSDs in my ASRock X99 Extreme6/3.1 board.

TanC wrote: Sorry, I meant the X99 variant. I have a 950 Pro 512GB on this one. It works fine. Given the 950 pro works fine, I figured the 960 would work, but lately I've come across so many compatibility issues, and I've been through 5 motherboards in the last 4 months. So it never hurts to just check. thanks

Compatibility issues with what? The 950 Pro? You'll need to install the UEFI/BIOS that adds NVMe support of course for any board besides a Z170 or other Intel 100 series chipset board.

Otherwise, all PCIe NVMe SSDs are NOT plug and play drives, like SATA SSDs. If you've returned five X99 boards due to issues with NVMe SSDs, then either they did not have NVMe support, or you were not installing Windows with things configured appropriately. Plus if you were trying to use Windows 7, which does not have an inbox NVMe driver, then configured correctly or not, that is bound to fail.

Or was it DDR4 memory problems? X99 systems can't use DDR4 memory designed for Z170 systems. Some memory manufactures acknowledge that, others don't. It also depends on the memory speed and the quantity you use, among other things.