M.2 860 EVO not recognized in BIOS nor Win10, help!

[JimKiler]

I bought a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO for my now ancient computer. I have the following:

1. Intel Core i5-4790K Devil's Canyon 4 GHz LGA 1150 (Haswell)
2. ASUS Z97-AR LGA 1150 Intel ATX Motherboard
3. G.SKILL Sniper Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1866MHz (PC3 14900)
4. Seasonic PRIME Ultra 650W 80+ Titanium Power Supply
5. Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB MLCCrucial MX200 500GB SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD - CT500MX200SSD1
6. MSI Radeon RX 580 DirectX 12 RX 580 GAMING X 8G 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
7. ASUS Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM 8MB Cache SATA Blu-ray Burner BW-12B1LT LightScribe Support

My motherboard supports M.2 and one of the first BIOS updates added NVMe support but this Samsung drive i bought is not NVMe so it should work. I have disconnected every drive but the Kingston SSD which has my OS. I turned the BIOS setting to be M.2 and I have no expansion cards, only the GPU. I played with the boot CSM settings from auto, to enabled to disabled. I read something about sometimes the M.2 uses the same resoures as SATA 1 and 2 ports so i unplugged those but still nothing. I cannot get this drive to display in the BIOS and Win10. Any suggestions?

 

[JimKiler]

I have now found a thread saying i cannot use a SATA m.2 drive if my mobo only supports PCEI m.2. This is bonkers that i this kinds of info is buried. I cannot even find anything in the data sheet at samsung.com confirming what type of drive I have.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I cannot even find anything in the data sheet at samsung.com confirming what type of drive I have.

Is it an M.2 (gumstick) drive? If so, the 850 and 860 EVO, are SATA, whether in M.2 or 2.5" format.

950 and 970 EVO M.2 are PCI-E NVMe. (There was also an PCI-E AHCI 950 M.2 drive.)

 

[Campy]

NVMe = PCIe

M.2 is just the physical form factor, it's possible to use both NVMe and SATA interface in the M.2 form factor, if the motherboard manufacturer makes the option available. Most motherboards today have two M.2 slots, and typically only one of them is set up so you can choose to run it in either NVMe mode or SATA mode, and the additional M.2 slots will be NVMe mode only. If the M.2 slot runs in SATA mode it is at the expense of a regular SATA port.

Per your motherboard manual your motherboard supports only an NVMe(PCIe) drive in the M.2 slot, and you will lose both your PCIe 2.0 x1 slots if you use it. The M.2 slot on your motherboard will have two lanes of PCIe 2.0 bandwidth which equates to 1GB/s, which will bottleneck the maximum speeds of a modern M.2 drive.

I recommend getting one of the cheap NVMe drives such as the Intel 660p 1TB.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I read something about sometimes the M.2 uses the same resoures as SATA 1 and 2 ports so i unplugged those but still nothing.

Chances are, if that is true, then the slot on your mobo should support PCI-E x2 at least, as well as SATA M.2.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Per your motherboard manual your motherboard supports only an NVMe(PCIe) drive in the M.2 slot,

OK, if true, then I'm wrong, and the M.2 SATA drive that you have, WILL NOT work.

 

[Campy]

OK, if true, then I'm wrong, and the M.2 SATA drive that you have, WILL NOT work.

Yes, I checked. The 860 Evo won't work in his board.

 

[13Gigatons]

Yes. You need to pay attention to the Sata vs PCIe versions. The PCIe version is better though why did you not get that?

 

[SimplyComplex]

I don't know why they do such a crap job of distinguishing between the different "M2" formats. Notice how we would sell IDE and SATA drives. We didn't have retarded marketplaces selling them as 3.5" drives. And keep saying 3.5"! Which is exactly what we do with "M2". The way the term "M2" is used implies it's a protocol and not a form factor.

Someone needs to fix this, and they deserve to eat a lot of restocking costs because of how incredibly poorly it's been managed.

I don't really blame consumers at all, because every "What is M2" article I've seen is written by someone who vomits random spec garbage and doesn't really distinguish between the versions.

How can I read so many spec pages that don't even list if the device is an M or M+B key? Why do they often fail to state at all if the drive is PCI-E or SATA?
This is entirely on the manufacturers and the retailers. They keep screwing up and it is far from the consumer's fault for not being able to sort out their crap descriptions.

 

[JimKiler]

I don't know why they do such a crap job of distinguishing between the different "M2" formats. Notice how we would sell IDE and SATA drives. We didn't have retarded marketplaces selling them as 3.5" drives. And keep saying 3.5"! Which is exactly what we do with "M2". The way the term "M2" is used implies it's a protocol and not a form factor.

Someone needs to fix this, and they deserve to eat a lot of restocking costs because of how incredibly poorly it's been managed.

I don't really blame consumers at all, because every "What is M2" article I've seen is written by someone who vomits random spec garbage and doesn't really distinguish between the versions.

How can I read so many spec pages that don't even list if the device is an M or M+B key? Why do they often fail to state at all if the drive is PCI-E or SATA?
This is entirely on the manufacturers and the retailers. They keep screwing up and it is far from the consumer's fault for not being able to sort out their crap descriptions.

I agree with everything you wrote. In Samsung's defense their drive is called a SATA M.2 but i never realized that SATA was there and i have been building PC's for 20 years. With my mobo being old and finding some internet posts about issues with NVMe versions of M.2 drives i assumed if I got a non NVMe drive i would be okay and since i only have 2 PCI-E lanes it did not make sense to get a NVMe drive currently. I wasted 2 hours before i gave up and since my boot drive is dying and it appears my mobo will not boot to M.2 i am returning this drive.

I only can put a M Key drive in my current mobo. I am hoping i can last till next year and upgrade to a new system and get a bootable M.2 NVMe drive.

 

[JimKiler]

Yes. You need to pay attention to the Sata vs PCIe versions. The PCIe version is better though why did you not get that?

I was trying to get a 1TB drive and since i have not gone NVMe yet i figured i would do this and when NVMe comes down upgrade to that in the future.

I found this article, https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Overview-of-M-2-SSDs-586/

The different keys are what indicated the maximum number of PCI-E lanes the socket can use and physically limit what drives can be installed into the socket.. A "B key" can utilize up to two PCI-E lanes while a "M key" can use up to four PCI-E lanes. Right now, however, the majority of M.2 sockets use a "M key" even if the socket only uses two PCI-E lanes. As for the drives, most PCI-E x2 drives are keyed for B+M (so they can work with any socket) and PCI-E x4 drives are keyed just for M.

That describes my mobo, M key but only 2 PCI-E lanes, LOL, i hope most consumer drives on the market are M key. I saw that my board has the missing connectors and I questioned if that was an issue, turns out it is since that makes it a B+M key which again my mobo does not support.

Thanks for the help everyone!

 

[Charlie22911]

Honestly the improvement to the user experience doesn’t scale the way an NVMe spec sheet would suggest. A high end SATA (2.5 or M.2) would be sufficient in all likelihood. Unless you are doing something like editing RED 8k raw footage...

 

[13Gigatons]

Honestly the improvement to the user experience doesn’t scale the way an NVMe spec sheet would suggest. A high end SATA (2.5 or M.2) would be sufficient in all likelihood. Unless you are doing something like editing RED 8k raw footage...

True...but then people couldn't post those benchmark screenshots with super high read and write speeds. People love posting those screenshots.

 

[whm1974]

Do current motherboards with M.2 sockets still have the issues the OP is having?

 

[UsandThem]

Do current motherboards with M.2 sockets still have the issues the OP is having?

Some. I've seen a few boards with multiple M.2 slots where one of the slots only support SATA drives. A person really has to look at the detailed specs so they know what they are getting. I've seen some that have one PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, and the other slots only support slower speeds.

My Dell laptop also has a M.2 slot that only supports SATA drives.

 

[whm1974]

Some. I've seen a few boards with multiple M.2 slots where one of the slots only support SATA drives. A person really has to look at the detailed specs so they know what they are getting. I've seen some that have one PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, and the other slots only support slower speeds.

My Dell laptop also has a M.2 slot that only supports SATA drives.

Thanks. Hopefully by time I get around building another system those issues will be fixed.

 

[UsandThem]

Thanks. Hopefully by time I get around building another system those issues will be fixed.

It's really not an issue per say, it's just how the motherboard manufacturers want to configure the M.2 slots. Sometimes it might be a way to get people to move up to a more expensive board, or other times it has to do with the onboard SATA connectors as many times the M.2 slot shares lanes with those. That's why putting a drive in many M.2 slots disables some of the SATA connectors, disables some PCIe slots, or lowers the bandwidth of some PCIe slots.

When it's time for you to build, just look at the detailed specs of the M.2 slots, and it will tell what will work in them, and what happens to other connectors on the board.