Kingston Digital HyperX Predator PCIe SSD

[samovar]

I’m looking at adding an SSD to my Hackintosh system. Has anyone gotten the Kingston Digital HyperX Predator m.2 PCIe SSD to work with a Z87 motherboard as a bootable device in a PCIe slot? What about just as a fast storage device, for use alone or with a spinning disk for a Fusion Drive?

I’m specifically looking at the model with the HHHL (Half-Height Half-length) adapter, which adapts it for a standard PCIe 2 x4 slot. It has OROM for booting Windows but I don’t know what that means; it doesn’t seem like it would be “optical read only memory."

I have found some references to this SSD, but for the combination of a Hackintosh, OS X, a Z87 motherboard, and the HHHL version. I would definitely like to know whether it is bootable in that situation.

I have a Gigabyte Z87X-OC Force with BIOS version F9, if that makes a difference. I currently run Chimera but have also tried Clover in the past. Figured I would at least consider PCIe options before settling on a SATA SSD.

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

I’m looking at adding an SSD to my Hackintosh system. Has anyone gotten the Kingston Digital HyperX Predator m.2 PCIe SSD to work with a Z87 motherboard as a bootable device in a PCIe slot? What about just as a fast storage device, for use alone or with a spinning disk for a Fusion Drive?

I’m specifically looking at the model with the HHHL (Half-Height Half-length) adapter, which adapts it for a standard PCIe 2 x4 slot. It has OROM for booting Windows but I don’t know what that means; it doesn’t seem like it would be “optical read only memory."

I have found some references to this SSD, but for the combination of a Hackintosh, OS X, a Z87 motherboard, and the HHHL version. I would definitely like to know whether it is bootable in that situation.

I have a Gigabyte Z87X-OC Force with BIOS version F9, if that makes a difference. I currently run Chimera but have also tried Clover in the past. Figured I would at least consider PCIe options before settling on a SATA SSD.

I was looking into this, and I think the answer is yes.

The OROM (Option ROM?) allows the device to be seen as bootable, both UEFI and legacy style. Kingston publicly stated they tried this in several older generations boards and all were successful except for one X58 board. They did not elaborate on which board models, but stated they got it booting successfully as far back as the 6 Series chipset. This is good news for us. Some 6 Series boards had UEFI updates available as beta and a few non-beta eventually too. The fact it booted on the tested boards in legacy mode, another bonus.

Ive been looking into this exact model the last few days. Performance is very good. Its behind the SM951 (PCIE3.0 x 4) of course, but is not that far behind it. The only 2 question marks on this SSD right now are :

1. Price. It is currently priced higher than the SM951 here in U.K
2. Power usage. In a laptop it uses a lot of power so can drain the battery a bit. (Not an issue for desktop of course).

My chosen board will also be Z87.

 

[samovar]

Anyone else taken the plunge to try it? This post at InsanelyMac didn’t seem entirely positive, but it at least seemed to show some signs of working.

 

[ammulder]

I am using a 240 GB predator to boot OS X in a NUC5i7, though in that case it's installed directly into an m.2 slot on the board. So I can vouch for the drive itself, but not for the motherboard or the configuration with it installed into a PCIe card.

I will note that it didn't display as a UEFI bootable device until the OS X install finished completely (it would only show up under Legacy boot before that). I got real confused when the Yosemite install rebooted midway and I didn't realize it wasn't done and I was tearing my hair out because neither the F10 boot selector nor Clover would boot to the new install! But when I booted back to the USB installer, it finished the install and then I could boot to the predator fine.

 

[samovar]

Thanks, @ammulder, that gives me a little more confidence it might work.


I don’t know how the NUC5i7 compares to a Z87 Haswell setup. It looks like the NUC is 5th generation, vs 4th for the Z87/Haswell.

 

[Fordski]

I’m looking at adding an SSD to my Hackintosh system. Has anyone gotten the Kingston Digital HyperX Predator m.2 PCIe SSD to work with a Z87 motherboard as a bootable device in a PCIe slot? What about just as a fast storage device, for use alone or with a spinning disk for a Fusion Drive?

I’m specifically looking at the model with the HHHL (Half-Height Half-length) adapter, which adapts it for a standard PCIe 2 x4 slot. It has OROM for booting Windows but I don’t know what that means; it doesn’t seem like it would be “optical read only memory."

I have found some references to this SSD, but for the combination of a Hackintosh, OS X, a Z87 motherboard, and the HHHL version. I would definitely like to know whether it is bootable in that situation.

I have a Gigabyte Z87X-OC Force with BIOS version F9, if that makes a difference. I currently run Chimera but have also tried Clover in the past. Figured I would at least consider PCIe options before settling on a SATA SSD.

I've been using one in an Asus Z97 Deluxe board in the PCI_3 slot at x4 settings and it works fine as a boot device using UEFI Clover. Speeds are close to rated speeds. One little change I need to make in bios is that it would not boot when Boot was set to Fast Boot: once I disabled it it was fine with all the other regular bios settings I was using with a regular SATA SSD. CSM disabled and security disabled, OS set to other OS.

Re fusion drive, I was considering trying it as I had my regular SSD set up as a fusion drive and quite liked the convenience. However I have not done that yet as I'm concerned about sacrificing some of the speed benefits of the PCIe drive. Good luck