Gigabyte Z390 M Gaming build with working NVRAM

[miliuco]

@tedyun
"With dual boot, I haven't played around with Win 11. I just need a weekend to sit down and install it. But here is a great tutorial by @miliuco that I am planning on following."

But don't forget that OpenCore can boot Windows itself, without custom entry. It does an automatic detection of windows systems. The goal of the custom entry is to put macOS icon before windows icon in the picker, otherwise OpenCore puts windows before macOS.

 

[tedyun]

@tedyun
"With dual boot, I haven't played around with Win 11. I just need a weekend to sit down and install it. But here is a great tutorial by @miliuco that I am planning on following."

But don't forget that OpenCore can boot Windows itself, without custom entry. It does an automatic detection of windows systems. The goal of the custom entry is to put macOS icon before windows icon in the picker, otherwise OpenCore puts windows before macOS.

When @pastrychef does it, I'll do it!

Seriously though, I have my OC set so that it completely skips the picker. I tried to make it as close to booting up an actual Mac as best as I could. My BIOS splash screen is customized to show the white Apple on black background, so the only difference is the BIOS menu options that appear during POST, then a brief blackout when it switches through OC to the actual macOS loading.

When I want to boot to Windows, I intercept it at the BIOS stage and manually select the Windows boot drive. I rarely boot to Windows anyway. It's mainly to game, but I don't really have much time to game these days.

 

[quartarolo]

Hello friends
I will buy another SSD M2 and I will use the other M2 entrance, I am in doubt between
WD_BLACK SN750 NVME Gaming 2TB
and the
Samsung - 970 Evo Plus 2TB PCIe Gen 3 X4 NVME
This other entry will work perfectly? Delivering the same speeds?
Thank you very much

 

[tedyun]

Hello friends
I will buy another SSD M2 and I will use the other M2 entrance, I am in doubt between
WD_BLACK SN750 NVME Gaming 2TB
and the
Samsung - 970 Evo Plus 2TB PCIe Gen 3 X4 NVME
This other entry will work perfectly? Delivering the same speeds?
Thank you very much

@quartarolo :

I would avoid Samsung NVMe's. There is a documented problem that so far affects the 970 EVO series (regular, Plus and Pro) and likely affects other Samsung NVMe's.

General NVMe Drive Problems (Fatal)

There's discussion in Monterey threads about slow boot times with Samsung. Dortania (vit9696) has narrowed this down to problems in Trim support versus Apple's NVMe driver. They are asking for users to help with their testing. Moreover, according to same article, Apple's NVMe driver is known...

www.tonymacx86.com

It occurs doing boot time, and if you set OpenCore to allow macOS to perform TRIM (which you should), on the Samsungs, it takes much longer to perform. The issue really came to bear in Big Sur, and it is reported to be the same or exacerbated in Monterey.

I would go with the WD SN750. So far, people are reporting success with that using Big Sur and Monterey.

 

[pastrychef]

 

[tedyun]

View attachment 535473

I'm thankful for the amazing people who dedicate their time on tonymac, like pastrychef, Utterdisbelief, Feartech, CaseySJ, c-o-pr, miliuco and many many more, to help other people with this peculiar hobby.

 

[ngc7789]

@quartarolo :

I would avoid Samsung NVMe's. There is a documented problem that so far affects the 970 EVO series (regular, Plus and Pro) and likely affects other Samsung NVMe's.

General NVMe Drive Problems (Fatal)

There's discussion in Monterey threads about slow boot times with Samsung. Dortania (vit9696) has narrowed this down to problems in Trim support versus Apple's NVMe driver. They are asking for users to help with their testing. Moreover, according to same article, Apple's NVMe driver is known...

www.tonymacx86.com

It occurs doing boot time, and if you set OpenCore to allow macOS to perform TRIM (which you should), on the Samsungs, it takes much longer to perform. The issue really came to bear in Big Sur, and it is reported to be the same or exacerbated in Monterey.

I would go with the WD SN750. So far, people are reporting success with that using Big Sur and Monterey.

I have a Samsung 970 EVO (not pro or plus) NVMe as my Big Sur boot drive. I do have slow boot times (I've not done the measurements but I'd say around 30 seconds), and all this talk of drive failure has gotten me sufficiently concerned that I grabbed a WD SN750 on a Black Friday deal. While I wait for its arrival I'm preparing for the move. What is the best approach? Carbon Copy Cloner? Fresh install and migration assistant? Something else?

 

[pastrychef]

I have a Samsung 970 EVO (not pro or plus) NVMe as my Big Sur boot drive. I do have slow boot times (I've not done the measurements but I'd say around 30 seconds) and all this talk of drive failure has gotten me sufficiently concerned that I grabbed a WD SN750 on a Black Friday deal. While I wait for its arrival I'm preparing for the move. What is the best approach? Carbon Copy Cloner? Fresh install and migration assistant? Something else?

When I switched from my Samsung 970 EVO to SN750, I used Migration Assistant. It worked great.

 

[nottooshabby]

I have a Samsung 970 EVO (not pro or plus) NVME as my Big Sur boot drive. I do have slow boot times (I've not done the measurements but I'd say around 30 seconds) and all this talk of drive failure has gotten me sufficiently concerned that I grabbed a WD SN750 on a Black Friday deal. While I wait for its arrival I'm preparing for the move. What is the best approach? Carbon Copy Cloner? Fresh install and migration assistant? Something else?

Super Duper is a free clone utility that I have used a few times to fully clone a drive and make it bootable.

 

[tedyun]

I have a Samsung 970 EVO (not pro or plus) NVME as my Big Sur boot drive. I do have slow boot times (I've not done the measurements but I'd say around 30 seconds) and all this talk of drive failure has gotten me sufficiently concerned that I grabbed a WD SN750 on a Black Friday deal. While I wait for its arrival I'm preparing for the move. What is the best approach? Carbon Copy Cloner? Fresh install and migration assistant? Something else?

@ngc7789 : I also did the fresh install and migration assistant. I just seemed easier this way rather than to learn how to use CCC to make a bootable clone of Big sur/Monterey (although that's something I need to do...). I had the cloner strategy down as plan B in case the fresh install didn't work properly.

The only thing that didn't migrate properly were the folder icons for the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. If you have these applications, they reside in your Applications folder, and they custom folder icons that have "Ps" "LrC" "Ai" etc, in special colors. After the migration, they were there, but in generic folder icons. Functionally, the programs all worked, but it bugged me.

I simply uninstalled then reinstalled the applications.