Anyone else having Samsung EVO problems on AMD 990FX Chipset?

BlueThumb · January 4, 2019

So my 10 year old Patriot SSD finally died and I replaced it with a Samsung 860 EVO. Long story short, what a nightmare that was, ending with me begrudgingly having to use an older spare SSD. Anyway, it would not work at all on my ASRock 990FX Fatality mobo while also retaining support for my 9590 CPU. I ended up using the 860 EVO on another gaming system, which had 5-year old SSD that I moved over to the ASRock. Ironically, the EVO 860 works fine on my other system, which is also a 990FX chipset. Then again, the other system is a popular ASUS mobo that has more current driver support.

Long version..

I had to update the bios just to see the drive and Win10 was just simply an unstable mess. The latest version of bios by ASRock adds NvME support and seems to work correctly (bios showed the drive) but at the same time de-lists the 9590 CPU. The mobo had literally locked me out of Windows as long as my 9590 CPU remained installed. I would have had to put in a 6300 or 8300 series CPU to get it working. I wasn't about to replace the CPU on such an old system so I loaded a modded version bios that puts the 9590 back on the support list. The ASRock saw the 860 EVO drive and booted...but was super fickle and unstable. What a huge waste of time that was.

Anyway else have driver issue with the Samsung EVOs? I've seen quite a few message boards on this topic, nearly all leading to an RMA of EVO. Lastly for now, I'm going to benchmark the EVO and see if it's any better than the ancient SATA3 SSDs I was running. I do plan to migrate the EVO over to a newer Ryzen system in the future...with the assumption I won't have driver issues.

BlueThumb · January 4, 2019

Solved (at least for now): I learned from another website that older AMD SATA ACHI drivers are barely compatible with the EVO. You can manually replace old AMD drivers with Windows standard drivers under device manager. I tried that and it worked great. I now have a stable system with solid read/write times.

I can't believe that AMD doesn't offer updated drivers for the latest SSDs. Well, it turns out they might. So I went to AMD's website and downloaded their latest driver pack. AMD has some NVMe drivers that are fairly current so I may try the latest driver pack. If it works out better than the latest standard windows drivers I'll report back.