Asus Strix Z270F and Samsung 960 Pro M.2 NVMe

[pheonix7]

I installed windows 10 on a Asus Strix Z270F M.B. on a regular SATA HDD and when i try to install the driver of the M.2 Samsung 960 Pro i get a warning message stating that the it can't find the device. So I believe its not even being recognized by the BIOS.

Am I missing some configuration in my BIOS? How do i have the M.2 recognizable?

Thanks!

 

[alexoiu]

Have you testes the other slot too?

 

[Eximo]

Change the SATA ports you are using. Generally when an M.2 PCIe 4x device is used it disables some SATA ports and vice/versa.

You also need to flip a few settings in the BIOS if I recall to enable M.2 PCIe devices. Most systems must also have their disk controllers set to RAID to detect PCIe SSDs.

 

[KLund1]

There are a couple tutorials at the ASUS forums that helped me with this for my similar Z270f/SM961 setup.
One thing I learned, was that you have to use them in UEFI mode if you want to use it as a boot drive. That means you will have to have Win 10 UEFi install media too. The manual in the box is pretty useless for these drive. Do a google search and you should find the tutorials.
Also your HDD, ODD's have to be UEFI compliant as well or UEFI WIn 10 will not see them. It seems this MB only likes the newest hardware. Be careful on your memory choice as well. I would recommend using only ASUS approved kits as this time in the Z270 life cycle.

 

[pheonix7]

Thanks guys for answering! What worked was what alexoiu mentioned. I had initially tried mounting the Samsung 960 PRO on the M.2 slot close to the CPU but that wasn't working. So then i mounted it on the bottom one and it work perfectly. I didn't need to modify at all the BIOS setting.

Is it possible that there is some kind of preference between the slots (Master/Slave or Primary/Secondary), that one only works if the other is also in use? I don't have 2 M.2 drives so i can't test it.

 

[PeruvianHighs]

It's prpbarbly becuase you were already using the PCIE ports on your motherboard, for example running a graphics card. I remember reading in the manual that the NVME disables some of the sata ports.