I have a new ASUS G752VL-DH71 laptop and I installed a SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 512GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 SSD in it. The hard drive is totally usable in Windows (as drive G:
) but there are three issues:
- The write performance of the drive according to Anvil Utilities is only 54 MB/s, which is much lower than it should be.
- I tried to install the official Samsung NVMe Driver v1.1 from this page but the installer gives me the error message "Samsung NVM Express Device is not connected. Connect the device and try again."
- The drive is not recognized by my Windows 10 USB installation media, which is a problem because I want to eventually install Windows 10 on the SSD.
I think the root problem that is causing all of these issues might be that there is some virtualization/compatibility layer/driver running that is taking the drive and making it look like a SATA drive instead of a PCIe drive. The Device Manager shows that my SSD is being controlled by the Intel Chipset SATA Raid Controller (iastora.sys):
I looked around in the BIOS of this laptop, which is version 208, and tried changing various options but that did not help.
Question
How can I make Windows recognize my SSD as an NVMe device instead of a SATA device?
Update 1
By pressing escape while the laptop starts up, I can access the BIOS. Here is a screenshot of the Advanced -> SATA Configuration screen. It shows the spinning platter HDD that came with the laptop and it shows the DVD drive, but it doesn't show the SSD. All of that seems good to me. There are no settings here that I can actually change.
Best Answer
The key is that you need to disable RAID entirely in the BIOS. If your BIOS is old, it will not support disabling RAID, and you will need to update it first.
Here is a screenshot of my successful SATA Configuration settings in the BIOS:
Updating the BIOS
My laptop shipped with version 208 of the BIOS. I updated to version 219 by following this procedure:
G752VLAS.219
.