I put the SM951 NVMe inside my 2009 Mac Pro, but OS X wouldnt even recognize the drive. I dont have any other 9-series motherboards at hand, but I suspect that any motherboard with advertised NVMe support and appropriate BIOS will boot from the SM951 NVMe.
Im working on an article comparing all the modern 15-16nm NAND processes, so stay tuned for more in-depth analysis of Samsungs 16nm node.īack when the XP941 became available the situation was rather messy because motherboard OEMs had not prepared for PCIe SSDs yet, which require BIOSUEFI support from their side in order to show up in the boot menu.įortunately, most OEMs fixed this for 9-series motherboards and now most models have a BIOS update available with proper support for PCIe and NVMe SSDs. The firmware development is likely the reason why the SM951-AHCI was the first one to market because Samsung already had the basic AHCI firmware from its XP941 and SATA drives, whereas the SM951-NVMe needed more development from scratch given how different and more efficient the NVMe command set is.
That isnt surprising, though, because nearly all client-grade NVMe controllers I know are capable of supporting both - its just a matter of developing two separate firmware builds.
Since both versions of the SM951 are technically OEM-only, the close naming isnt really an issue, but if you are shopping for the SM951 I recommend that you take a close look at the part number before pulling the trigger to ensure that you get the version you are looking for.īoth utilize Samsungs S4LN058A01-8030 controller dubbed as UBX, which is a PCIe 3.0 x4 controller that apparently supports both AHCI and NVMe driver stacks. The AHCI version carries the code MZ- H PVxxx0 (where xxx is the capacity in gigabytes), whereas the NVMe version is called MZ- V PVxxx0. This was rather confusing at first because Samsung had specifically told us that the SM951 doesnt support NVMe, but after a closer look and a series of emails with Samsung the drive turned out to be an NVMe version of the SM951, or SM951-NVMe as Samsung calls it.
The company was the first one on the market with a PCIe 2.0 x4 M.2 SSD the ( XP941 ) back in late 2013, and before that it was the first one to adopt TLC NAND in 2012.Įarlier this year Samsungs second generation client PCIe drive, the SM951, made an appearance in a Lenovo laptop, but to everyones surprise the drive wasnt NVMe compatible like Samsung had announced earlier.Īfter discussing with Samsung, the company said they it has an NVMe client drive in development, but it declined to provide any reasoning as to why the SM951 still used the AHCI driver stack.