Q re Sata ports on z97 Extreme6

The Ultra M.2 port on this board does not share anything with the Intel SATA III ports, so that is not the problem.

The only storage interface that uses any of the Intel SATA III ports is the SATA Express connection. Given SSDs like the SM951 (I have one too) or XP941, and any of the other PCIe type M.2 SSDs, I think SATA Express will never be used as an SSD interface.

You're not the only one having problems with their optical drive and Z97 board recently. The Intel 8 and 9 series chipsets adopted newer SATA standards that cause some SATA devices to be incompatible with their SATA ports. An example of that is any older SSDs that use the Sandforce 1200 series controller. I don't know of any specifics regarding compatibility issues with optical drives, but my guess is problems like yours are related to the changes in these chipsets.

All of the SATA3_A ports are provided by two ASMedia 1061 SATA chips. They are completely separate from the Intel SATA interface. If your optical drive works fine on the ASMedia SATA ports, great, just use them instead. You're not loosing any performance since any optical drive is a SATA I interface in speed, if it even can reach SATA I speeds.

Unfortunately, this is a time of "growing pains" for PCs. Older technology is holding back new technology, and at some point things begin to be left behind.

Question for you, do you have the Intel IRST driver installed, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver and utility ver:13.1.0.1058 from your board's download page? Or do you use the native Win 8.1 AHCI driver?

FYI, the new UEFI version 2.10 for your board (I have one too) has the updates the 2.04 beta UEFI does, to allow booting from a SM951.

Speaking of the SM951, how do you like it? The Windows 8.1 installation I did on it worked perfectly the first time, no problems at all. That installation broke all my records for the fastest Windows installation I have ever seen.

Have you monitored its temperature? It can get warm, much more than any standard 2.5" SATA III SSD I have ever used.


Edited by parsec - 13 May 2015 at 12:51pm

If you're not using a video card in the PCIE2 slot, then heat issues with the SM951 are less likely.

I have seen a review of the SM951, the version used in Lenovo laptops (apparently different firmware then other SM951's, mine has BXW2500Q), that when tested with a custom benchmark program that runs for a long time (potentially hours), it reached ~90C, and seemed to throttle itself at that temperature.

I've seen mine hit 50C running a benchmark, so it definitely runs warmer than a standard 2.5" SATA SSD. I've never used any other M.2 SSDs that had a temperature sensor, but I have heard of temperature issues with some other M.2 SSDs.

In typical use in a PC, more so in a desktop, it won't have over heating problems.