I think their driver stopped support with 970 series, so no driver for 980 and 990 series.

GL

 

All you need is Samsung magician and update firmware on drive.

 

IF you can actually get the firmware update to stick. I have two 990 Pros and only one was able to be firmware updated.

It might have to do with both being VMD/RAID managed, even though I'm not running them in a RAID volume. The first one flashed fine (C: Drive) but the second one (D: Drive) never was able to update it's firmware. I might eventually pull that second one out and put it in a second rig (sans VMD) and try but not too concerned about it.

 

Officially, no.

Unofficially, the NVMe driver for prior SSDs does work with the 990 Pro. It's supposed to be faster than the MS driver, but I do not have any recent Samsung SSDs to personally test this.

You can just force the 970 driver to install through device manager, or you can download modified & signed genericized Samsung drivers. I've linked to Fernando's (a moderator at WinRaid who I consider reputable) below:

Recommended AHCI/RAID and NVMe Drivers

Preliminary notes: Many AHCI and RAID users are unsure or don’t even know, which AHCI/RAID driver will give them the best results regarding stability and performance. They either don’t have the time or are not interested to do intensive tests comparing the different types and versions of the...

winraid.level1techs.com

68.1 KB file on MEGA

mega.nz

 

Unofficially, the NVMe driver for prior SSDs does work with the 990 Pro. It's supposed to be faster than the MS driver, but I do not have any recent Samsung SSDs to personally test this.

Its faster when you measure it by tool such as LatencyMon.

Also the driver allocated maximum amount of IRQs for a MSI-X device - 2048, way too many as in fact it uses only fraction of them and I corrected this value to more appropriate 33 IRQs which is maximum the drive could take and use.

There is some minor benefit to the performance, but I would not try to force this driver to a different drive as the ones supported. Its quite finnicky and I could not manage to pin the driver to specific CPU threads, else the device will fail to operate.

 

FWIW: I have a 990 4TB is my big gamer which works fine. It replaced the 980 2TB which is now on the shelf. I also have a W7 gamer which presently has a 970 1TB and it also works fine. I attempted to use the the 980 in the W7 rig and there is no driver. After querying the Samsung site, it appears there will be no drivers above the 970 for W7. I've been up and down Reddit and just about everywhere else with no luck. I did run into several threads where people are trying to make a "roll your own" 980 driver for W7, but so far haven't heard of any success.

 

The Samsung 990 Pro is built for the Standard NVMe Microsoft driver.

 

I have updated my firmware to the latest, so no problem there. As far as the driver, I also saw on the Samsung site there was nothing past 970, which is why I asked. I found it strange. I don’t want to force or hack a driver. So Samsung reccomends that we use the MS driver? If that is the case, I am fine with that, if it is what is recommended.

 

Been digging a bit regarding Physical Sector size and Cluster size options for my Samsung 970 PRO.

It appears that Samsung driver tells system that Physical sectors are of 512 byte size:

fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo e:
LogicalBytesPerSector : 512
PhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 512
PhysicalBytesPerSectorForPerformance : 512
FileSystemEffectivePhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 512
Device Alignment : Aligned (0x000)
Partition alignment on device : Aligned (0x000)

This is microsoft driver:

fsutil fsinfo sectorinfo d:
LogicalBytesPerSector : 512
PhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 4096
PhysicalBytesPerSectorForPerformance : 4096
FileSystemEffectivePhysicalBytesPerSectorForAtomicity : 4096
Device Alignment : Aligned (0x000)
Partition alignment on device : Aligned (0x000)

For most of my drives I use 16KB cluster size (except OS which uses 4096b), because Techpowerup NVMe database tells that 970 PRO has 16kb page size.


Also i did some tests using Latency Mon and first suite of Crystal Disk Mark.

Samsung Driver puts everything through storport.sys, its about 320 000 DPC calls and takes 1300 miliseconds to complete.

Microsoft driver splits tasks between storport.sys and stornvme.sys. In total its still about 320 000 DPC calls but it takes about 1200 miliseconds to complete.

Also results in CrystalDisk Mark are by few megabytes better. 3576mb/s read vs 3586mb/s. with microsoft driver properly set to close processor.