Solved Are your Nvme hotfix files the only requirement for Win7?

New to this forum (first post) and wanted to thank you for your efforts. Can't stand Win8/10 and would like to stick with Win7 as long as possible. Your site is great for all for want to continue using it. Thx.

Have seen earlier posts here regarding owners wanting to use an M2 Nvme SSD for their boot disk or just programs, games, etc. I just finished a Win 7 64 reinstall on a Asus Z270-A board I6700 12gb and plan on upgrading shortly to a 500gb-1TB M2 probably just for quicker overall program response. Currently have a Samsung 250gb SSD for Windows and a 1TB SATA HD for data and standard program installs.

Understand that the manufacturer driver may be necessary but I did download and install your two hotfix files for Nvme and wanted to make sure that they would allow Win7 64 to see the Nvme drive. Not sure if I have any way to "test" for Nvme operation without having a drive installed other than checking the BIOS.

If I do decide in the future to go with the Nvme drive as my boot disk, will having the hotfixes applied to my current Win7 keep me from having to reinstall an updated 7 ISO with the driver included?

Thanks again for all of the help you provide here.

Welcome to the Forum.

I have a Samsung SM951 – 128GB M.2 AHCI PCIe SSD drive for Windows 7 and Lubuntu and a 1T WD SATA 3 for Data.
What I'm saying is that you don't need a big SSD. You can have the speed of a SSD and the space of a HDD at low cost.
As you already have a SSD you will be disappointed with the M.2 SSD. You will only notice the difference on a benchmark test.

This is what I would do.
- Buy the M2 Nvme SSD, insert on the MB slot ( It is very important that you unplug the power supply cord from the wall outlet before you remove or insert any device on the MB).
- Boot from the current disk (SSD-256).
- Windows will find a new hardware and ask for a driver. Open device manager and Install the driver.
- The M2 Nvme SSD drivers you will find here Update your Win 7 installation media.
- If everything is working fine, clone the OS disk into the M2 Nvme SSD.
- Shut down, detach the current disk (SSD-256) and boot from the M2 Nvme SSD.

Megahertz07 said:

It is very important that you unplug the power supply cord from the wall outlet before you remove or insert any device on the MB

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I'm curious why you do not trust the on/off switch that is on the power supply

rallynfool said:

... plan on upgrading shortly to a 500gb-1TB M2 probably just for quicker overall program response. Currently have a Samsung 250gb SSD for Windows

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If you replace your samsung ssd with an M.2 pcie nvme drive you will notice an improvement in benchmark score and your boot up time may improve by a slight amount, but I very much doubt you will notice an improvement aside from that (other than the placebo effect). The only way to get a noticeable user experience improvement is to spend through the nose and get an intel optane ssd.

I would have to check but didn't think my 6700 processor was Optane capable. Strange think about my boot time - On my previous install with the same Samsung SSD, with Win7 (and all other programs) cloned onto it from my original 1TB HD, my boot time was about 15 seconds. That was even with the SSD almost completely full and me getting pop up screen warnings about slow performance. Now, with a clean reinstall of Windows from a downloaded ISO (previous computer was an HP that died and the restore file wouldn't work with the new MB), the boot time is about 35 seconds. I am checking to see what is being loaded at startup and see what adjustments I might need to make there.

Was thinking about the M2 Nvme hearing that the speeds were greatly improved and not wanting additional cabling for another SATA drive in the box. I could go with an M2 for just a boot drive and nothing else which would give me the 250gb Samsung for games.

I think one of my questions from my first post was if installing the two Nvme hotfixes from this site on that SSD would mean I could just clone the drive to the new M2 without having to go thru the hassle of a full Win7 reinstall with the Nvme drivers added to the files since I just did that 2 weeks ago. I thought I read that was possible on another Nvme thread I saw here. My DVD ISO with USB drivers added in worked fine and I could add in the Nvme drivers as you have instructed on the separate thread here if I needed to.

While I did build this latest unit (and a few others back in the days of XP), I am still a bit of a novice when it comes to some of the technical material this site provides and "operations" that is may ask you to do. There is going to be a learning curve as a get familiar again with how all of this works. I appreciate the responses so far and will explore other threads on the site to re-learn even more. I have a different question regarding SSD speeds and will ask that in another thread. Thank you again for your help.

rallynfool said:

I think one of my questions from my first post was if installing the two Nvme hotfixes from this site on that SSD would mean I could just clone the drive to the new M2 without having to go thru the hassle of a full Win7 reinstall with the Nvme drivers added to the files since I just did that 2 weeks ago.

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The easiest way to install an m.2 nvme drive as your win7 boot drive is exactly how you are doing it. Shutdown, connect your m.2, boot from an existing drive, then add the nvme drivers or as you say it might even autodetect. Regardless, depending on what m.2 drive you are adding, the manufacturer may have its own driver you can download (this is true of my samsung evo 960 m.2) as well as update the firmware of the drive and tune the drive. Once the driver is loaded you can then do the clone. Note that AFTER the clone, its best if you do that very first boot from the m.2 with all other drives disconnected. Rest assured, you will not need to do a fresh install.

With the Samsung SM951 – 128GB M.2 AHCI PCIe SSD (1950 MB/s read and 680 MB/s write) the boot time is around 25 Sec.
It isn't very different with a Samsung 850 Pro.
As I wrote above, you only see the difference on the benchmark test.

As a SSD has it's life time related to erase and write, there are some procedures to avoid unnecessary trash files to be located on the SSD. The most important is to set the temp files to be stored on the HDD and to install programs that are constantly updated (like antivirus) also on the HDD.

In my opinion, you have a very good computer and a M.2 SSD wont make it much better. Also a M.2 PCIe that cost US$ 0.6 per G will soon be cheaper than a HDD.

Good advice , thank you. Here's my SSD question that I was going to put in a new thread - I have a Samsung 850EVO 250gb that I purchased a couple of years ago when everything was more expensive. Most of the current pricing on 500gb Nvme seem to be around $60-70 US.

After doing a re-install of my Win7 ISO, the performance specs seemed about normal and almost exact as advertised by Samsung. I enabled the "Rapid mode" and according to the Magician software, I'm now showing 7000 sequential read / 4568 write and random IOPS of 241,699 and 130,615 read/write. Again, I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to the newer tech, but those number are much higher than what I've been seeing for an Nvme M2 PCIe 3.0x4 drive. Are these numbers real or is there another test to run to check performance? Thx.

Those numbers are real but they aren't a measurement of your SSD. Rapid Mode uses Ram for caching so a lot of the reads/writes aren't transactions between memory and disk, they're between memory and memory.. For some real fun try creating a ramdisk in your memory and run the tests on it.

This is the results on my 850 Pro using Crystaldiskmark
CrystalDiskMark6_0_2

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 557.074 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 471.879 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 406.524 MB/s [ 99249.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 363.693 MB/s [ 88792.2 IOPS]

Wanted to touch base again to give you an update and thank all of the responders for their help.

I wound up deciding to leave my Win7 OS on my 250gb C: Samsung SSD as my boot drive. Other than a couple of programs that wouldn't allow me to choose to install them on my D: 1TB HDD to save space and hopefully speed, that's everything that's on that drive.

I purchased an Intel 1TB 660P Nvme last week on a good sale and the installation went perfectly. With the two hotfixes downloaded from here, Win7 saw the drive right away and a quick trip into disk management got it setup as my F: drive to use primarily for games and video work with it's quicker speed. I have read and understand that my speed may drop to about 100Mbs/sec after the 660p is about 75% full, but my current 1 TB platter never reached much over 25% capacity over the past few years so I expect I'll be okay on the new M.2 for quite a while.

I've recently retired (yes I am that old), and plan on finally playing some newer games for the first time, as well as some much older games (Win XP mode with a VC?) that I enjoyed a number of years ago. If that doesn't work, I still have an older Pentium computer with XP installed along with several "new" never installed original full XP installation disks to use if necessary. I plan on searching the forum for any help I need on the XP mode questions that I'm sure I'll come up with.

Again, thank you for all of your help from everyone here on my Nvme questions. Great forum. Much appreciated.
It would not have gone so smoothly without the help of the forum "staff" so I really appreciate everyone's input on this.

My suggestion is to set the virtual memory from C: to the HDD and to set the user and windows temp folder also to the HDD.