SM951 on Z97M Fatal1ty Motherboard

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   This is all great information, Parsec, thank you. 
I can see how 'compatibility' could mean different things to different people... I definitely made an assumption that the compatibility list equated to the drive being bootable as well but I think that assumption is quite reasonable. 

The drive is indeed compatible as a storage drive as long as a SATA disk is used as the primary boot. A nasty side effect of this is that the UEFI is unusable until you remove the SM951 as it is treated as a graphics card, forcing a black screen with an unmovable mouse cursor in the middle.

I benchmarked the card (as the D: drive in Windows 8.1) and the results were less than staggering due to the PCIe x2 limitation you mentioned before. Seq. Read = 488 MB/s, Seq. Write = 750 MB/s. I thought it strange that the write was faster in this case.

I just couldn't justify using this drive with such marginal gains over the much cheaper Samsung 850 EVO drive (over 500 MB/s read/write) using the SATA 6 GB/s interface. 

What would happen if I ran (2) 850 EVO drives in RAID 0? Is the 6 GB/s speed limitation per interface or a controller bandwidth limitation?

Thanks again for your observations and attention to detail. 

Edited by schickenipple - 02 Jul 2015 at 4:48am

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schickenipple Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 24 Jun 2015 Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote schickenipple Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 02 Jul 2015 at 4:46am
	This is all great information, Parsec, thank you. I can see how 'compatibility' could mean different things to different people... I definitely made an assumption that the compatibility list equated to the drive being bootable as well but I think that assumption is quite reasonable. The drive is indeed compatible as a storage drive as long as a SATA disk is used as the primary boot. A nasty side effect of this is that the UEFI is unusable until you remove the SM951 as it is treated as a graphics card, forcing a black screen with an unmovable mouse cursor in the middle. I benchmarked the card (as the D: drive in Windows 8.1) and the results were less than staggering due to the PCIe x2 limitation you mentioned before. Seq. Read = 488 MB/s, Seq. Write = 750 MB/s. I thought it strange that the write was faster in this case. I just couldn't justify using this drive with such marginal gains over the much cheaper Samsung 850 EVO drive (over 500 MB/s read/write) using the SATA 6 GB/s interface. What would happen if I ran (2) 850 EVO drives in RAID 0? Is the 6 GB/s speed limitation per interface or a controller bandwidth limitation? Thanks again for your observations and attention to detail. Edited by schickenipple - 02 Jul 2015 at 4:48am