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

[mchis]

For those of us not having an x4 M.2 mobo connector and so looking for a good adapter, this might be the king of them all: http://barefeats.com/hard211.html

Edit: Just ordered it - and that's ahead of the 950Pro itself

 

[dakishimesan0]

Interestingly, I get different read speeds on the same 950 Pro drive on different machines. Maybe a bandwidth limit to the slot?

I'm not sure if anyone answered this question yet ammulder, but yes you are correct – in the 5i5 NUC, the M.2 slot is connected to the PCIe bus at PCIe 2.0 x4, with a max speed of 2GB/s before overhead, versus the PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots in z1XX and some z9X motherboards, which doubles the available bandwidth to 4 GB per second.

Still, only sustained reads on the 950 pro can hit above 2000 MB per second and in my practical experience it's very fast on the 5i5 NUC.

 

[UNOE]

Got my Samsung 950 pro. Install went well just updated clover. Then threw in NvmExpressDxe-64.efi into the 'drivers64UEFI' folder (even though the installer doesn't allow that, had to install it on a USB stick with BiosblockIO then get the driver NvmExpressDxe-64.efi and throw it in 'drivers64UEFI' folder). After that I threw the NVMeGeneric.kext into Kext folder for clover. Booted to a OS X installer USB stick used restore option with Disk utility to copy me oldssd install and booted up 950 pro just fine from the EFI boot loader on OldSSD. Then installed clover with EFI on the 950 pro, transferred over all my files from my clover folder under EFI partition from old SSD to 950 pro EFI partition. Now booting with just 950 pro with EFI.

I'm very surprised EFI boot works with my old board with no bios update. I still have my same 4.6ghz overclock running a much older 4205 bios version on Rampage IV Extreme x79 with 3930K (Sandybridge-E). This was not support to be possible. I see threads were people are having issues with it showing up as EFI drive. Other people says it shows up as PATA. But not mine it showed as EFI drive. Again this was with no bios mods, or bios updates, just same old bios been using for years. Clover EFI doing all the work

[FONT=Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif]My speeds on old SSD were around 480 read and 410 write. Now doing 2050 Read and 880 write. I believe I'm getting these speeds only because the Rampage Extreme board is capable of PCIE 3.0. Not all boards will have the PCIE 3.0 but some of the higher end ones will for Sandy and Ivy.

What I find most impressive here is no bios update is needed if you have clover, [/FONT]NvmExpressDxe-64.efi in 'drivers64UEFI' folder with NVMeGeneric.kext in your Clover/Kext/10.x.x folder.

 

[UNOE]

I'm not sure if anyone answered this question yet ammulder, but yes you are correct – in the 5i5 NUC, the M.2 slot is connected to the PCIe bus at PCIe 2.0 x4, with a max speed of 2GB/s before overhead, versus the PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots in z1XX and some z9X motherboards, which doubles the available bandwidth to 4 GB per second.

Still, only sustained reads on the 950 pro can hit above 2000 MB per second and in my practical experience it's very fast on the 5i5 NUC.

Interesting you are saying PCIE 2.0 will hit 2GB with x4 lanes. I see some people saying they are getting half speed, I was assuming it was reverting to PCIE 2.0. So disregard my second to last paragraph above.

 

[DRAI10]

Happy new year everybody,
Hi UNOE, really you did it? congratulation
please may you please explain clearlly what the steps to follow?

Much thanks,

 

[UNOE]

Happy new year everybody,
Hi UNOE, really you did it? congratulation
please may you please explain clearlly what the steps to follow?

Much thanks,

I'm actually not sure what was not clear, because each step was in my post? Do you have a specific part you don't understand?

 

[davidm71]

Anyone know how to hack the nvme driver kext so the drives show as internal?

Going to see if I can boot from one now..

 

[UNOE]

Anyone know how to hack the nvme driver kext so the drives show as internal?

Going to see if I can boot from one now..

Mine shows as internal

 

[mchis]

Now doing 2050 Read and 880 write.

I guess these figures are from the 256GB version?

And congrats on the excellent writeup UNOE (i.e. #60)!

 

[Smallersen]

I managed to boot Yosemite, but only with twice reboots. Booting now stucks again at "Configuration begin"

Samsung 950 Pro on a Asus X99 Deluxe Board with 5960x processor. SMBIOS set to Mac Pro 6.1.

This changings brought me to boot, but only twice:
Used latest Clover_v2.3k_r3330
Extracted "NvmExpressDxe-64.efi" from Clover package and put it in drivers64UEFI - folder
Put NVMeGeneric.kext in EFI 10.10 folder (tried that before without success) and S/L/E
Changed "Inject keys" in Clover settings from Auto to Yes

Before "Configuration begin" this entrys are missing in NVMe verbose log, maybe the reason why it stucks here
BSD root:...
hfs:...
VM Swap Subsystem is ON

Anybody an idea how to fix this?