M.2 960 SSD and MSI Mortar Arctic H270m Shutting down / crashing with Samsung NVMe EVO 960 [Solved]

[nielolee]

I cant get them working together.

Plugging in the EVO 960 NVMe into my M.2 Turbo slot on the board caused massive stabilty issues, if I attempt to install win 10 from USB to the SSD my whole pc crashes and shuts down.

If I start my pc from another drive with a Windows 10 installed (sata mechanical drive) and attempt to initialise the new SSD through Winsows disk manager (Disk not seen in My Computer) or migrate data from old drive to new drive using Samsung Migrate software, again the PC crashes.

This cant be the SSD, its a new replacement as I RMA'd the last one already for the same reason.

What else might cause this, did you do anything different to make it work?

Mortar Arctic H270m m-Atx
Samsung NVMe SSD 960 EVO M.2 250GB
Intel i5 7600 (non overclock model) standard Fan
2 x 4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR 2400 (Slots #2 and #4)
Onboard Graphics Only Intel 630
Thermaltake SP Smart 550w PSU

Im thinking my M.2 port might be faulty, also the MB is new and it turned out my BIOS CMOS battery was dead from new, I have bought a new battery yesterday and it seems to have fixed the issue of not saving my BIOS changes.

I still cant use the EVO 960 as a boot drive or slave because it crashes my PC if i try to read/write to it.

 

[nielolee]

Just updating for anyone else who may have this issue, the troubled MSI board was returned to the place of purchase and replaced under warranty.

I received the replacement board a couple of days later and installed it immediately and now it works – flawlessly – however I did flash the BIOS to the latest version first and foremost (as the latest MSI firmware specifically indicates better support for M.2 960 drives) before installing the Samsung NVMe SSD 960 EVO M.2 250GB or any other HDD and VGA cards.

With only the core essentials installed; i5 CPU, 1 stick of 4GB Ram, onboard VGA and hooked up PSU and Monitor – powered on loaded up-to BIOS Version 0.

Flashed the BIOS upto V1,
Restarted the PC loaded into the updated BIOS now V1
Flashed once again to latest BIOS V2

Restarted again just to confirm BIOS V2 was running fine with recommended defaults.
Shut down PC, disconnected power supply – installed m.2 SSD, reconnect PSU, Turn on PC and board immediately detected new hardware M.2 and no crashing.

This time the PC started first go, and has been running awesomely fast since installing over 1 week ago.

No more shut downs and power cycling loops.

I cant explain exactly what the previous issue was, but I can confirm the M.2 port on the motherboard certainly has something buggy or QA issues (everything else on the board worked fine)

So I am a happy camper now, considering this is my first MSI board and I purchased specifically for the M.2 SSD speed enhancements over other drives.

My faith in MSI has been restored.

Can a moderator please mark this thread as [Solved] I cant edit it.