Has anyone booted a Samsung SM951?

[Riley Freeman]

I'm planning to upgrade the SSD in my Z68 to something bigger and have been tempted to go PCIe by the speeds of the Samsung XP941/SM951. These drives don't have any bootcode and rely on a UEFI driver in the BIOS. Now, I've seen posts where people have added the SAMSUNG_M2_DXE uefi driver to their BIOS and successfully booted the XP941. However, the SM951 is newer, faster and in some places cheaper than the older XP941. Modding my BIOS isn't a problem, but from reading some forum posts I'm not convinced I'll be able to boot the 951 with it.

 

My Z68 can boot UEFI but there's no option to disable CSM and some posts suggest this is required to get Windows installed. When I had Ozmosis on this board I had no problem loading it or the HFS driver so I'm not sure if disabling CSM is a required step to load a UEFI driver in general. I currently dual-boot 7 and OS X via Clover and plan to do this with the new drive as well.

 

So, the question is, has anyone actually done this yet? The alternative is to get a regular SATA drive as the speeds of the other PCIe drives aren't too spectacular (apart from the bigger and more expensive Intel 750). I'd like to try PCIe just for a change but at @ €200 for the ssd and adapter card I can't take the risk of it not working.

[Riley Freeman]

Thanks for the info PJALM. So how did you boot them? Just by adding the Samsung driver I mentioned?

 

That's interesting that you reckon the 941 is faster, considering it's PCIe 2.0 while the 951 is 3.0. Having a Sandy CPU I'd only be able to run at 2.0 speed anyway.

 

As for the adapter I was thinking about the Lycom DT-120 as it's often mentioned in connection with these Samsung SSDs.

 

Maybe it's a little early yet as a MX100 or MX200 would work perfectly fine here. I'm just curious about trying out something new.