Question 1

Did anyone actually get to purchase one of these from Newegg? Trying to figure out if they immediately they never received any. Samsung website still says the 512 gb will ship by 11/21, which is what it has said for a couple of weeks now.

Accepted Answer

The only reason I pre-ordered 2 of these was that I expected breech to follow through with their 11/15 release date. As of my last communication with their customer support newegg themselves have no ETA on receiving their shipment of drives from Samsung. Needless to say I'm sure that I'm not the only person irritated by their inability to fulfill the expectations they set.

Question 2

Samsung missing it's ship dates?  It is 10 days late on the 512 GB 960 Pro and several months late on the sm961.  Are we getting irritated?  Has Newegg answered any questions about ETA?

Accepted Answer

Newegg has fulfilled orders for this preorder already. The reason they are still listed as such - they are awaiting arrival of more to come in stock. This is normal. No known ETA has been provided to me for the 960 - not sure about the SM961, but probably same issue. Samsung needs to ship more product out to retailers since it's apparently very popular.

Question 3

I have the M5A 78L-M USB 3 board from ASUS.  It has no PCI Express 3.0 x 4 receptacle.   How can I make this work? Will it run slower? And will it fit the PCI 2.0 x 16?

Accepted Answer

Greetings,

The Samsung 960 Pro drive requires an M.2 port on either the motherboard or via a PCIe adapter card. Yes, the drive will work in a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot if you have the proper adapter card but the motherboard must also support NVMe. After looking the motherboard over, I doubt it has the NVMe support needed for the system to recognize the drive. My brother's Asus Crosshair V Formula Z motherboard has the same issue. I can think of two solutions to the problem. The first and easiest solution is to purchase a Samsung 850 Pro Sata 3 drive instead. The second solution is to upgrade to a motherboard that has M.2 NVMe support, such as the Asus 970 Pro Gaming/Aura, Asus TUF Sabertooth 990FX R3 or the MSI 970A Gaming Pro Carbon if your case can accept a standard ATX sized motherboard. I have not been able to find any AM3+ motherboards in Micro ATX size with a M.2 NVMe compatible port.

Question 4

Will this SSD work with a Lycom PCIe Adapter for M.2?

Accepted Answer

I looked into this adapter, it looks as though it would do the job.  This is not a M.2 SSD per say, but it is a NVMe SSD.  I don't know for sure that it will work I don't know about your setup, but it looks like it would be available to put information on.

Question 5

Does this SSD work with MACBook air 2015?

Accepted Answer

I really don't think it will.  This requires an M.2 socket and a NVMe controller.  I don't believe that the MacBook you mentioned has those components.  However, to be sure, there's a whole bunch of information on the Samsung SSD web site that will likely give you a definitive answer.  Good luck.

Question 6

Can I use this with Windows 7 pro?

Accepted Answer

Technically, yes you can use this drive with Windows 7 Pro. I have not tried it as of yet but Samsung lists Windows 7 as one of the supported operating systems for this drive. I will warn you that you will likely experience difficulties installing Windows 7 onto this drive as with any NVMe based SSD.

Question 7

What is the NVMe driver supposed to do? Wouldn't it be fast without it?

Accepted Answer

solid state storage has run into a significant hurdle: legacy storage buses. Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) offer plenty of bandwidth for hard drives, but for increasingly speedy SSDs, they’ve run out of steam.

Because of SATA’s 600Gbps ceiling, just about any top-flight SATA SSD will score the same in our testing these days—around 500MBps. Even 12GBps SAS SSD performance stalls at around 1.5GBps. SSD technology is capable of much more.

The industry knew this impasse was coming from the get-go. SSDs have far more in common with fast system memory than with the slow hard drives they emulate. It was simply more convenient to use the existing PC storage infrastructure, putting SSDs on relatively slow (compared to memory) SATA and SAS. For a long time this was fine, as it took a while for SSDs to ramp up in speed. Those days are long gone.  Fortunately, a suitable high-bandwidth bus technology was already in place—PCI Express, or PCIe. PCIe is the underlying data transport layer for graphics and other add-in cards, as well as Thunderbolt. (Gen 2) offers approximately 500MBps per lane, and version 3.x (Gen 3), around 985MBps per lane. Put a card in a x4 (four-lane) slot and you’ve got 2GBps of bandwidth with Gen 2 and nearly 4GBps with Gen 3. That’s a vast improvement, and in the latter case, a wide enough pipe for today’s fastest SSDs.  One of the best things about NVM Express is that you don’t have to worry about drivers showing up. Linux has had NVMe support since kernel 3.1; Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 both include a native driver, and there’s a FreeBSD driver in the works.  
However, BIOS support is largely lacking. Without an NVMe-aware BIOS, you can’t boot from an NVMe drive, though anyone with a x4 PCIe slot or M.2 connector can benefit from employing an NVMe drive as secondary storage. An NVMe BIOS is not a difficult technical hurdle, but it does require engineering hours and money, so it’s unlikely it will stretch far back into the legacy pool.

Question 8

Will this work properly and will fit last generation of LENOVO Yoga 710 15IKB with 7 th Generation of intel I7 ?

Accepted Answer

As far as fitting in your Lenovo PC, that depends on whether or not you have a M.2 socket in that machine that accepts 80mm drives.  Check the manufacturer's specs on that issue.

With regard to the NVMe PCI-Express drive format, again you must refer to the manufacturer's specs.   Sometimes the BIOS needs to be updated to accept an NVMe drive.  If you have a SINGLE index slot 2280 M.2 drive connector, the drive will probably work, but check the specs to be sure.  Hope that helps.

Question 9

How long does it take to rip a bluray on an x99 system with this drive?

Accepted Answer

Write time is dependent upon the specifications unique to your Blu-ray drive and, somewhat,  on the media used and not on the HDD type.  Even the slowest HDD can send data faster than can be written to a DVD/Blu-ray. The ripping software controls the rate that the HDD sends data in order to prevent data loss ("buffer overrun").

Question 10

I have an gigabyte lga 2011-3 x99-ultra gaming mb would this be a good fit for a boot drive??

Accepted Answer

These things are blazing fast, and I am using mine in a new Ryzen 7 build as the boot drive. I am getting the rated 3.2 GB/sec read, and 2.4 GB/sec write. You just need to make sure that your MB supports the NVME boot drives. I have one in my old 2011  V1 x79, but I can only use it as a super fast secondary drive for installing programs on since they never updated the BIOS for the NVME boot capability. Whtwlf

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