Question 1

Will this work with an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS VIII HERO LGA 1151 Intel Z170 motherboard? The board shows support for m.2 but I just want to be sure as this is my first time dealing with any m.2 drives.

Accepted Answer

Yes it's will, the Maximus Viii Hero supports M.2 pci-e x4 drives, be aware that you will be using 4 pic-e lanes from your pic-e sockets, read your manual, when you populate the M.2 socket, one of your pic-e slots will either downgrade or disable depending on your CPU, for example if your CPU has 20 pic-e lanes, the 950 pro takes 4 of those leaving you with only 16 lanes to be shared between your video, sound, or any other cards you may have installed in your pic-e slots.  One more thing, if you are going to use the 950 pro as a boot drive, then you must install your operating system in UEFI mode or else you won't see the drive during installation, as a secondary drive you can install it normally and Windows will see it. The 950 pro is a little tricky for the new guy to install so read your motherboard manual, but it is well worth the price and reading time, these drives are a beasts, nothing comes remotely close to their performance.

Question 2

Can i use this as a boot drive?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but I would only recommend running Windows10 because it has required drivers that earlier versions of Windows lack. This will save you a lot of headaches that I went through. I'm sure new updates have been released by now to make things easier. Good luck.

Question 3

can m.2 drives be used as boot/OS drives?

Accepted Answer

yes - be sure, after installing the drive on your motherboard, and before doing anything else, go to samsung's web, and download their NVMe driver for the 950 PRO

Then the easiest way to install windows, is on the same samsung page above, download their "data migration" software and use it to copy your current OS drive to the 950

Question 4

Does it support multiple video cards?

Accepted Answer

It's a hard Drive. The ability to support multiple video cards will depend on your motherboard and processor. This requires 4x PCI Express 3.0 lanes so if you have a processor that only supports 28 lines then with a second video card the first will be using 16x the second 8x and this drive will use 4x so all 28x will be used.In a 3 video card all 3 video cards would be running at 8x with the drive running at 4x.

Now if you have an Intel 5930K or 5960X then you have 40 lanes instead of 28 that the 5820k has. so then you could have 2 cards both running at 16x and in a 3 card configuration you could be running 16x,8x,8x and still have 4x that the drive requires.

Question 5

I hear you dont get full write performance without samsung's driver. where can I find the driver? I've looked everywhere!

Accepted Answer

A Samsung Driver for the Samsung SSD 950 Pro does exist and can be located on the Samsung website via this google search criteria: "Samsung SSD 950 Pro Driver" (Newegg request that links not be posted).

The Samsung driver filename is: Samsung NVM Express Driver 1.0.exe and is contained in a Zip file named:   Samsung_NVMExpress_Driver_rev10.zip.

When installed successfully, the driver is listed in Device Manager under Storage controller as Samsung NVMe Controller.

Good Luck

Question 6

Will this work with this motherboard..??
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7 AM3+

Accepted Answer

You would need to get an M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 adapter as your motherboard doesn't have an M.2 slot built in. An example (please note that I do not vouch for this item, it's merely used as an example for you to find an adapter you like) would be this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=12K-017B-00001

Question 7

Would this work as the primary boot/sole storage drive on an EVGA Z170 FTW LGA1151 motherboard?

Accepted Answer

The motherboard page says it supports NVMe drives so yes, BUT in order to use the full PCIE 3.0 x4 lanes it needs to disable SATA ports 4&5.  This is a pretty common practice with the latest Intel chipsets.

Question 8

I currently have one 512GB 950 Pro installed.  I have slots for two and I am wondering if I install a second does the second SSD show up as a new drive or would it expand my existing C: drive by 512GB?  I work with data hungry programs like civil3d and Pix4d and this drive works wonderfully, but 512GB is not enough space.

Accepted Answer

You have a few options:

1 - Hardware Raid - The depends on your motherboard's capabilities. You are looking for Raid-0 (two drives working together as one). Look at your motherboard's manual, or ask their support folks. Beware: Creating a Raid-0 from no raid will might delete your existing data. Best to tread carefully or be prepared to re-install the OS and restore data from backup.

2 - Software Raid -You cannot create a typical dynamic disk on your system disk (C:), but you could take part of your space on disk 1 and add it to all of disk 2 and call it D:. To do this, shrink the C:, then look into Dynamic Disks or a new item called Storage Spaces.

BEWARE - No matter which option you use, if one of your two disks fail all of your data will be lost. Also, make sure you have backups and are ready to re-install your OS. Playing around with partitions can be dangerous, especially if you have never done it before.

Question 9

I have an Asus Z97 Pro motherboard.  It has an M2 port, but will I be able to run this at full speed?

Accepted Answer

Carroll:

Your Asus Z97 Pro must have an M.2 connector with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 capability to achieve the full 950 Pro performance. Many Z97 motherboards are limited to x2 such as my Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H and the 950 Pro is limited to ~ 12Gbps. I am not familiar with the Asus Z97 Pro if it's M2 connector is x2 or x4. The Asus website should help.

If your M.2 connector is only x2 you can purchase an inexpensive M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 adapter such as Lycom DT-120 card. This adapter will fit in one of your available PCIe version 3 slots (e.g., x4) and with its M.2 connector allow the 950 Pro to operate at full speed. With this adapter, GA-Z97-UD5H achieves the ~ 2500 MBps read throughput and ~ 1500 MBps write throughput per ATTO.

Good luck!

Question 10

Does this use pcie lanes? im using a z97 pro gamer motherboard with a 4790k if that matters.

Accepted Answer

Sort of: If you have an M.2 slot on your motherboard (in every 16-lane-PCIe-CPU case I've heard of at least) then while this does technically use up to 4 PCIe lanes to communicate, it's not subtracting from the (likely 16) PCIe lanes your CPU offers directly for things like a graphics card and other slotted PCIe devices.  See, Intel CPU's have an additional 4 PCIe lanes on top of what they advertise that connect the CPU to what's called a PCH or Platform Controller Hub.  The PCH then connects to all the other devices on your system that don't go directly into a PCIe slot, including built-in devices on your mobo like LAN and WiFi.  If, however, you plugged this SSD into an adapter that then seats into a PCIe slot, then yes you'd be eating up 4 PCIe lanes direct to your CPU.  The SSD might be a hair faster that way, but I'd rather reserve all 16 primary PCIe lanes for my two GPU's myself.  I see someone has stated differently with regard to his X99 ASRock Extreme4 motherboard and I'd have to assume that's because his board can support CPU's with more than 16 PCIe lanes, so maybe they wired the M.2 slot straight to the CPU in hopes of offering better throughput.  I can confirm for a fact that it works the way I'm saying on the Z170 and Z270 mobo's however.

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