Is Z97 MPOWER MAX AC Mainboard compatible with SAMSUNG 990 PRO or WD _BLACK SN850X SSD?

[chilli1111]

Hi,

 

I want to get a new SSD because my old one keeps filling up with stuff. I was thinking about buying a Samsung 990 Pro or a WD Black SN850X, and I was looking around the Internet to find out whether my motherboard, Z97 MPOWER MAX AC, is compatible or not. I found some posts stating it was compatible and some stating it wouldn't make a difference between a normal SSD and a M.2. I also found an article where someone used a "Lycom DT-120 M.2 SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter Card" to attach a NVMe SSD to his Z97 motherboard. I honestly have no clue what to do. Maybe you could help me understand the differences and decide what I should buy.

Thanks in advance!

[leclod]

I believe your MB supports PCIe Gen 2 M.2 which might mean max 2GB/s.

So if I were you I'd buy a cheap M.2 (2TB) ssd like the Intel 670p and be happy with it

4*times the speed of a sata ssd

 

 

Edited June 19, 2023 by leclod

[leclod]

Wait, in the manual, it's written max 10Gb/s which is quite a bit less and not much more than sata speed indeed

Untitled1.pdf

[Tan3l6]

10 Gb/s = 10/8 GB/s

Gigabyte = 8 gigabits 

So yeah,  1,25 GB/s

[leclod]

5 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

10 Gb/s = 10/8 GB/s

Gigabyte = 8 gigabits 

So yeah,  1,25 GB/s

Seems I got bad at math,

So still double the speed of sata3, right ?

Edited June 19, 2023 by leclod

[Tan3l6]

2 minutes ago, leclod said:

Seems I got bad at math,

So still double the speed of sata3, right ?

Yeah but for a high end NVMe SSD its still a fair bottelneck, or more like a needle hole.

Edit: I was bad at calculating, before editing...

[leclod]

2 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

Yeah but for a high end NVMe SSD its still a fair bottelneck, or more like a needle hole.

Edit: I was bad at calculating, before editing...

why not go cheap ? I use a 660p

[Tan3l6]

Just now, leclod said:

why not go cheap ? I use a 660p

Yeah, that what I meant - no point buying a high end NVMe.

660p is cheap and does the job. Although there are some better options regionally I believe.

[leclod]

Or you could buy that Adapter Card and a higher end ssd keeping in mind your MB bottlenecks at Gen3 (4GB/s) in the best case.

 

I believe with the cheap option you'd get 85% of the expensive option in real world experience

 

(There's that UEFI restriction in the description though, I don't exactly know what it means, you run an UEFI Bios, right ?)

Edited June 19, 2023 by leclod

[Agall]

55 minutes ago, chilli1111 said:

Hi,

 

I want to get a new SSD because my old one keeps filling up with stuff. I was thinking about buying a Samsung 990 Pro or a WD Black SN850X, and I was looking around the Internet to find out whether my motherboard, Z97 MPOWER MAX AC, is compatible or not. I found some posts stating it was compatible and some stating it wouldn't make a difference between a normal SSD and a M.2. I also found an article where someone used a "Lycom DT-120 M.2 SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter Card" to attach a NVMe SSD to his Z97 motherboard. I honestly have no clue what to do. Maybe you could help me understand the differences and decide what I should buy.

Thanks in advance!

In my opinion, you mind as well go for a PCIe 4.0 M.2 regardless, since the price isn't much more, and if something happens to your near decade old z97 platform, you can just transplant it to a new system that'll make full use of it.

 

Z97 boards and M.2 were weird, my Z97 impact supports full PCIe 3.0 4x, but a lot of boards that era were 2x, some even PCIe 2.0 it seems. PCIe 2.0 2x is still far better than SATA, so I'd opt for it.

[Sarra]

17 minutes ago, Agall said:

In my opinion, you mind as well go for a PCIe 4.0 M.2 regardless, since the price isn't much more, and if something happens to your near decade old z97 platform, you can just transplant it to a new system that'll make full use of it.

 

Z97 boards and M.2 were weird, my Z97 impact supports full PCIe 3.0 4x, but a lot of boards that era were 2x, some even PCIe 2.0 it seems. PCIe 2.0 2x is still far better than SATA, so I'd opt for it.

I've got a Gigabyte h97 that has a gen3 m.2, but it's janky and only works reliably at gen2 speeds. Same with the pcie 16X slot.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

High end gen4 ssds are pointless for the average gamer or user that doesnt do stuff like high res video editing that can actually take advantage of gen4

 

Just buy a cheap one like the msi m371, silicon power a80, etc.

 

And any leftover budget you can use to actually upgrade platform alongside the money you get for reselling the board + cpu + ram, you can problably get a used ryzen 1600/2600 or even 3600 based combo as an upgrade cause some ppl still overpaying for ancient haswell stuff

[Agall]

5 minutes ago, Sarra said:

I've got a Gigabyte h97 that has a gen3 m.2, but it's janky and only works reliably at gen2 speeds. Same with the pcie 16X slot.

z97 itself supports not only NVMe M.2 drives but also AHCI M.2 drives. I believe my Z97 impact (which I still have) still runs the Samsung SM951 AHCI 500GB PCIe 3.0 4x drive I bought for it way back in 2015. Its not the easiest thing to get Windows installed on, but once its working, it works.

 

I remember back in that time it was hit or miss with a lot of Z97 motherboards, Z107 being better at supporting NVMe natively when it came out.

 

 

Even recently fired it up to do some testing lol. It ran my TV for a while after retiring it as my main rig back in 2021 or so.

[Sarra]

2 minutes ago, Agall said:

z97 itself supports not only NVMe M.2 drives but also AHCI M.2 drives. I believe my Z97 impact (which I still have) still runs the Samsung SM951 AHCI 500GB PCIe 3.0 4x drive I bought for it way back in 2015. Its not the easiest thing to get Windows installed on, but once its working, it works.

 

I remember back in that time it was hit or miss with a lot of Z97 motherboards, Z107 being better at supporting NVMe natively when it came out.

Well, it was the first set of gen3 boards. Mine was an early example, and gen 3 was actually broken on my board on early BIOS. I have the last BIOS that Gigabyte released, and it works, but it does have reliability problems. I typically ran it in gen2 mode, though now I'm just running a 10GbE card in the 16x slot and it's reliable enough.

[chilli1111]

Thank you all for your help. I think I might go for a regular SSD, which should be less expensive and suitable for my needs.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

30 minutes ago, chilli1111 said:

Thank you all for your help. I think I might go for a regular SSD, which should be less expensive and suitable for my needs.

Btw what country?

1tb ssds generally go around the 35-50$ range nowadays

 

Here in indo the cheapest ones are around the 43$ mark for reference

[kokosnh]

23 hours ago, Agall said:

z97 itself supports not only NVMe M.2 drives but also AHCI M.2 drives. I believe my Z97 impact (which I still have) still runs the Samsung SM951 AHCI 500GB PCIe 3.0 4x drive I bought for it way back in 2015. Its not the easiest thing to get Windows installed on, but once its working, it works.

This can be quite mislieding as the SM951 MZHPVxxxHDGL-00000 SSD are the rare SATAexpress ones. It’s like the whole different breed, that is using AHCI protocol, but communicates through PCIe interface, like the NVMe SSD.
It will work on any other mobo that have PCIe on M.2, even if the mobo doesn't support normal AHCI SATA M.2 SSD. It can even work with old PC that don't support NVMe on PCIe adapter.

[Agall]

22 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

This can be quite mislieding as the SM951 MZHPVxxxHDGL-00000 SSD are the rare SATAexpress ones. It’s like the whole different breed, that is using AHCI protocol, but communicates through PCIe interface, like the NVMe SSD.
It will work on any other mobo that have PCIe on M.2, even if the mobo doesn't support normal AHCI SATA M.2 SSD. It can even work with old PC that don't support NVMe on PCIe adapter.

I've run both my AHCI SM951 PCIe 3.0 4x drive and standard PCIe 3.0 4x NVMe drives on my Z97 Impact. 

 

SAMSUNG SM951 M.2 2280 512GB PCI-Express 3.0 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZHPV512HDGL-00000 - Newegg.com

 

Generally required NVMe drivers anyways to work as an installation media for Windows back then, it wasn't a simple plug and play Windows install.