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Samsung NVMe boot on X79

CheapMeat

CheapMeat

Joined
Sep 14, 2017
Messages
627 (0.22/day)
Hey all, I wanted to ask this since there's a lot of conflicting info and often the answers are from complete noobs arguing different tangent things. So I have a Samsung 950 Pro working perfectly fine as a boot drive. But do the Samsung 960's have the same NVMe firmware/driver on the drive itself? My Samsung 950 Pro worked without any motherboard BIOS hacks, etc (although my ASRock board had an official NVMe boot BIOS update).
 
CheapMeat said:
Hey all, I wanted to ask this since there's a lot of conflicting info and often the answers are from complete noobs arguing different tangent things. So I have a Samsung 950 Pro working perfectly fine as a boot drive. But do the Samsung 960's have the same NVMe firmware/driver on the drive itself? My Samsung 950 Pro worked without any motherboard BIOS hacks, etc (although my ASRock board had an official NVMe boot BIOS update).
Click to expand...
No only Samsung 950 PRO has the OPT-rom also known as legacy-mode that allows it to be used on none NVMe platforms like X79 and i have one running in my X58 machine as OS drive. I will also point out that it seems 950 PRO does not work on all boards with out NVMe support. On X58 i have seen 950 PRO works great on Asus and Gigabyte boards while EVGA seems to fail. Just pointing it out as this alone can give conflicting answers from other people depending on what motherboard vendor they use.

I contacted samsung support a few years ago about there 960 series and they told me, that it dit not have that feature. So i asume that goes for 970 and 980 series as well.

So in short: only 950 PRO can be used on none NVMe supported chipsæt/boards with out mods or third party software. It is possible to use other NVMe SSD. But for that you need either a moddet or an official bios that support NVMe boot for your board or third party software that allows for boot on a NVMe SSD.

950 PRO running on my system. Used it since marts 2017.

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CheapMeat said:
Awesome! I really appreciate the response! I figured someone on TPU would know! :toast:
Click to expand...
I just seeking the information myself a few years ago and learned about it on that way.

And I can now share that knowledge with you and others.
 
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