OS X Driver for NVMe M.2 Solid State Drives Released

[Boil]

WOOHOO…!

Another step completed towards my Ultimate Hackintosh Cube…!

Come on, Driver Dudes, get the R9 Nano working in OS X…!!!

 

[Boil]

What sort of performance gains would one expect on a Z97 board that's capable of NVME?

It doesn't sound like the latest Skylake stuff is as stable yet so I'm not ready for a new motherboard. That said I would be ready to jump to NVEE and then just transplant that drive to a new motherboard in the future

I believe any Z97 board that has NVMe capability will run into the issue with PCIe lanes…

Please correct me if I am wrong, but if you get a PCIe 3.0 x4 device running, it drops the x16 slot (where most everyones GPU resides) to x8…

But according to what the Internet tells me, the performance drop from x16 to x8 is not that much, literally only a few FPS…

 

[awer25]

I also have a Z97 board and am considering getting this SSD with a 4x PCIe adapter. Being that I would use this M.2 NVMe SSD for OS X and my GPU mainly for gaming in Windows, does anyone know of an easy way where I could disable the M.2 SSD when booting into Windows so that the GPU gets full x16 speeds? Other than physically removing it that is.

 

[Boil]

I also have a Z97 board and am considering getting this SSD with a 4x PCIe adapter. Being that I would use this M.2 NVMe SSD for OS X and my GPU mainly for gaming in Windows, does anyone know of an easy way where I could disable the M.2 SSD when booting into Windows so that the GPU gets full x16 speeds? Other than physically removing it that is.

But according to what the Internet tells me, the performance drop from x16 to x8 is not that much, literally only a few FPS…

1

 

[TurbineSeaplane]

Hmm - Maybe I'll just pass on all of this until the Skylake boards are fully compatible.

Not sure I want do deal with any compromises when going nvme

 

[wildwillow]

Can you expand on this statement please: "Placed the NVMe driver in UniBeast USB/EFI/Clover/Kexts/10.11 this enabled the OS X installer to see the drive and allow me to install."

I just bought an Intel 750 Series AIC 400GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 MLC Internal SSD today. I updated the BIOS on my Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H, and BIOS can see the drive. The El Cap installer cannot, however. Nor can the Yosemite Disk Utility (no surprise there).

What steps do I need to take to inject the driver at Unibeast install time?

Use EFI Mounter v3 or Clover Configurator to mount the EFI partition of the UniBeast USB. Then as above, boot from the UEFI USB selection as boot priority, install.

 

[awer25]

1

I saw that, but I'd prefer no drop in performance if possible (with a 4K screen, I'm only getting ~45fps in Witcher 3 anyway). I did some more research and it looks like with PCIe 3.0, there may be no drop at all even at 8x.

 

[itsmikerofl]

This thread seems to really only specify about M.2 NVMe drives.

I have a 400GB Intel 750 AIC on the way, should I be able to use this .kext for my SSD?

 

[MadBlue]

This thread seems to really only specify about M.2 NVMe drives.

I have a 400GB Intel 750 AIC on the way, should I be able to use this .kext for my SSD?

Due m.2 is just the mechanical variant and NVMe over PCIe is the protocol, it should work for your direct PCIe SSD too.

 

[itsmikerofl]

Due m.2 is just the mechanical variant and NVMe over PCIe is the protocol, it should work for your direct PCIe SSD too.

Sounds good, thanks. I'll update once I found out.