MSI Throws Weight Behind NVMe, Adds Support to X99, Z97, and H97 Motherboards

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Another bottleneck bites the dust

Out with the old and in with the new, or in this case, MSI is anxious to bid a fond farewell to the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) and get cooking with Non-Volatile Media Express (NVMe). To get the party started, MSI issued a round of BIOS updates for a whole bunch of motherboards based on Intel's X99, Z97, and H97 chipsets, making the company the first motherboard maker to fully support NVMe.
The majority of solid state drives currently on the market use the SATA 6Gbps interface, though PCI Express-based SSDs are beginning to gain ground. This is where NVMe comes into play -- by adding official support to its motherboards, MSI is essentially getting rid of boot drive headaches and improving performance at the same time.
NVMe was originally conceived with SSDs in mind, or more specifically, for NAND flash memory. It needn't concern itself with spinning platters and various housekeeping chores required for mechanical hard disk drives, resulting in lower latencies, higher transfer speeds, and less power consumption for SSDs. In short, it's a more efficient hold controller interface for accessing SSDs through the PCI-E bus.
Again, this won't affect very many people at the moment, as PCI-E SSDs are primarily found in the enterprise sector. But if you're living on the bleeding the edge and own a modern MSI motherboard based on one of the aforementioned chipsets, check out this page for the BIOS update you should be looking for. Once updated, you should be able to use NVMe devices as primary storage in Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 8.1 64-bit.

Source: MSI

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