X10SDV-7TP4F and 960 EVO NVMe

[xck3001]

Hi,

I'm in the process of building a new system for a FreeNAS installation. The board is a X10SDV-7TP4F which has a m.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. My plan is to add a SSD into there which will host a few VMs, and my choice was the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe.

As of now I'm still in the process of setting the system up, but it appears that something is off with the disk or my configuration. The drive is nowhere listed in the BIOS, not as boot device or anywhere else. The FreeNAS installer doesn't list the drive as a possible installation location either. It's as if the drive wouldn't be there.

Dealing with NVMe is a bit new to me. Is there anything special I need to do in order to let the drive show up? Or will this only be the case once the OS is installed with all its drivers?
I've already updated the mainboard BIOS to the newest revision, but that didn't change a thing.

I'd appreciate your help on this.

 

[xck3001]

Turns out this is a widespread issue: How to workaround Samsung 960 PRO/EVO/SM961/PM961 M.2 NVMe drive disappearance after Supermicro Xeon D SuperServer BIOS 1.1c change or other boot changes | TinkerTry IT @ Home
At least that makes a fix via Firmware update more likely. When I rebooted with power unplugged, the drive is visible in both Win10 setup as well as FreeNAS setup.

 

[ServerSemi]

I have the same problem with my X10SDV d-1541. Bios doesn't detect my pm961 (960 evo oem)

Ended up using an old ssd that I had. Wish supermicro updated the bios for us to use it

 

[xck3001]

It seems to be a widely applicable problem, even with non-SuperMicro boards. And it actually surfaced for me a couple times without going to the BIOS first, so it's really unpredictable.
I'm probably going to return the drive.

 

[Patrick]

The older Samsung drives and the Toshiba / OCZ NVMe drives are better tested on these platforms. I would highly suggest using one of those instead.

 

[PigLover]

This isn't just a SM problem - its pretty universal with NVMe M.2 drives. With NVMe drvies in a PCIe slot there is the opportunity for an "option prom" on the card to set up the boot option, but you can't do this with M.2.

The drive won't show up in the BIOS because the BIOS only knows about SATA drives. But you can find it in the UEFI boot manager.

To use this drive as a boot drive you need to set the boot option for UEFI only (so that the FreeNAS installer picks UEFI - it still prefers legacy boot installs). Set the first boot option to be UEFI Disk and then disable all of the SATA drives in the boot UEFI "boot order". Then when you go into the FreeNAS installer it should be able to find the NVMe drive and when you reboot.

This works as long as the OS you are installing can boot from UEFI. I know it works with Ubuntu, Centos, Proxmox and Windows. I don't know if FreeNAS can boot UEFI. pfSense cannot (currently - next release should work).

 

[xck3001]

It's a different issue though. The 960 drives will be detected sometimes by the OS, and you can even boot from it; but under some circumstances it's lost and never shows up again until you cut power to the machine. Shutdown or reboot alone doesn't help. Mostly this happens if the BIOS was opened before, but that's not the only trigger.

 

[Jon Can]

I have an X10 motherboard with the same problem. I tried booting from few NVME drives including the 960 PRO and EVO with no luck.
On the other hand the 950 PRO with the latest firmware update (2B0QBXX7) worked fine. This NVME is backward compatible with Legacy bios.