Windows 10: Samsung 950 Pro M.2 and rapid mode

Hi guys,

finally made the leap from Win 7 to Win 10 and built a new machine as per my signature.

It's working quite nicely apart from one minor wrinkle with the Samsung 950 pro ssd and rapid mode.

While the 950 pro is fast and bench marks where it should be I can't enable rapid mode for it with Samsung magician version 4.9.7

I have the samsung nvme driver v1.1 installed - or at least I think but cannot see it in device manager properties for the 950 pro. Rather it says it's using the Micrsoft driver.

When I run magician and select the 950 pro it shows ok and says I'm using NVME controller version 1.4.7.17 and a PCIe slot - so everything looks good there.

Thing is when I select rapid mode it only shows the 850 evo and no sign of the 950 pro.

Rapid mode works great on the 850 evo and actually bench marks faster than the 950 pro.

I read elsewhere that rapid mode makes little difference in the real world - so perhaps I shouldn't worry ?

Hope this all makes sense - any ideas ?

Regards Tim

:)

 

Installing Windows 10 onto a Samsung Pro M.2 drive

I have a MSI X99S SLI Plus motherboard with an M.2 slot with the latest BIOS and drivers installed. I currently boot from a Samsung 850 pro 256gb SSD with Windows 7 Pro on it. I want to upgrade to Windows 10 but I would like to install it onto a Samsung
950 Pro M.2 NVM Express drive that I installed into the M.2 slot on my motherboard.

When I install the driver for the Samsung 950 Pro into my Windows 7 Pro drive, it appears to install OK and I can "see" the Samsung 950 Pro device. But, when I reboot my system, my Windows 7 Pro install, which is on my Samsung 850 is corrupt and I have to
revert to system restore to be able to boot back into my Windows 7.

I have tried installing the driver, then used Samsung Magician to clone my Samsung 850 Pro over to my Samsung 950 Pro and it appeared to copy OK but when I reboot, I get an error that the Samsung 950 Pro install is corrupt and can not boot.

I even removed the other drives so that the Samsung 950 Pro was the only drive in the system.

I believe that I must have at least Windows 8.1 to be able to successfully install this device. I have Windows 8.1 on another PC that I would be glad to migrate but it originally came with Windows 8 and I qualified for the free upgrade to 8.1. So, I can't
even use that install to get my Samsung 950 Pro setup as my Windows boot device.

Is there a way that I can download a copy of Windows 10, install it onto my Samsung 950 Pro and use my free upgrade rights to activate it?

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

 

Update 1709 installed but Update History shows requires restart

I have a custom gaming rig which I built my self it houses

Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 PRO M.2 NVMe which holds my OS

Samsung 840 EVO and 850 EVO and a western digital blue HDD.

I have no problems with these types of drives and the update.

As I mentioned before try the update assistant it help for me.

 

NvMe is not supported in Magician. Thats why you only see your Sata SSD's

 

aha - as simple as that then.
I'll just leave it set to accelerate my bulk storage ssd then.

Thanks for putting me straight !

 

NVME is actually supported in version 4.9.7 of Samsung Magician. I know because I have a 950 Pro myself, and also have Rapid Mode enabled....









Magician version 4.9.7

Perhaps the OP is using an older version and this their inability to enable Rapid Mode?

 

That looks like RAPID is activated for your 850 Pro to me*Wink
RAPID can only be activated for one single Samsung SSD on a system.
So it's only set for the 512GB 850 Pro.
Open up the Help in Magician and you will see that 950's are not supported for RAPID:

 

Indeed, I was just about to post that Cliff. The 850 is clearly using RapidMode, not the 950. Magician clearly says that RapidMode is not supported for the 950 on Windows 10.

Thing is, with the latest builds of Windows 10, I've seen no speed difference between the standard MS AHCI driver and using the Samsung NVMe driver. I'm thinking the new Microsoft driver may be NVMe aware.

I did benchmarks before and after, and before I was getting 2500MB/s sequential reads, just like I do with the NVMe driver.

FYI, to find out if you're using the NVMe driver in device manager, you look under storage controllers.

 

To get more information about M.2 disks, RAPID mode and other "White Paper's" go here: Documents | Download | Samsung V-NAND SSD

 

You are correct, I see Rapid Mode is on for the 850, not the 950. That said, it doesn't matter to me as I getting fast speeds anyway. BTW this is on a Z170X system. Haven't updated my specs.

Sorry. Out.

 

Thanks for all the guys - I think this puts it to bed.