The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    RB 14 2014 - 2015 NVME Upgrade?

    Discussion in 'Razer' started by RageBone, Aug 31, 2018.

  1. RageBone

    RageBone Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    5
    Messages:
    35
    Likes Received:
    4
    Trophy Points:
    16
    My 2014 and 2015s both have an M-Key m.2 slot thus allowing the installation of a pcie ssd.

    I got the chance to try it out with a Samsung PM951 and low and behold, it gets detected, but isn't bootable.
    No suprise here, though i can't boot my sata m.2 that came with the RB any more too, so something's up.

    The drive currently contains a Manjaro Linux install and if booted by a grub located on a usb stick, the nvme is detected ,it boots and does things fine.

    Only downside is the performance, gnome-disks benchmarks it at 417MB/s read and 120MB/s write with Average 0.03mSec latency.
    Worse then what is to be expected from the ssd and the 4xpcie2.0 DMI interface.

    But hey, it works, kind of : )
     
    RageBone, Aug 31, 2018
    #1
  2. hfm

    hfm Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    2,264
    Messages:
    5,296
    Likes Received:
    3,046
    Trophy Points:
    431
    Hmm.. I didn't think the 2014 blade supported NVMe SSD's.. interesting..
     
    hfm, Aug 31, 2018
    #2
  3. RageBone

    RageBone Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    5
    Messages:
    35
    Likes Received:
    4
    Trophy Points:
    16
    well, they don't.

    or at least, not jet. The only things missing are some uefi drivers, and a switch to change the port mode from ahci to nvme.
    that should be it. In theory.

    If you, like i did, circumvent the bios driver problem by booting a usb stick, and then switching over to the ssd, it works since grub can load nvmes.
    The crappy performance might be because of the portmode initially being set to ahci, though keep in mind, i have no clue, i know nothing : )
     
    RageBone, Aug 31, 2018
    #3
  4. RageBone

    RageBone Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    5
    Messages:
    35
    Likes Received:
    4
    Trophy Points:
    16
    I was wrong. Windows boots just fine.
    i'm amazed.

    The pm951 shouldn't support ahci. What is going on ?

    Why can't i boot linux, but windows ?
     
    RageBone, Sep 1, 2018
    #4