Does Area 51-R2 motherboard support NVMe SSD via PCIe?

I returned everything, not worth the money IMO

So what needs to be done to get these drives to work with the Area 51 R2? Do we need a bios update or is a limitation of the motherboard they used in our boxes?

NEED BIOS UPDATE FOR DRIVE TO WORK OR INSTALL NEW MOTHERBOARD 

AM MAYBE CHANGEING TO MSI X99A

Let us know how you go if you do decide to go down that route.  I noted that the new x51 has pcie ssd....so this is coming to the Alienware range....but somehow I don't think the Area 51 will have a bios update, more of a motherboard revision.  Never say never of course.

I already did change to msi a99x gameing 7 motherboard, but i got stuck with the ram. got stuck with my radiator water cooling msi motherboard  got 8 slot of ram first slot  2 slot under my radiator.  Maybe with low profile ram can be install. I use cosair dominator have tall heatsink.

My problem

1. Have to change ram if  i want to install Quad channel in correct order on msi motherboard

2. Light for case not work as i should be  ( you will need 2 internal usb cabel  60cm long from ebay )

If you install other motherboard you will need internal usb 3 cable 90cm

I think best option for now go with

1. ocz revodrive 350 ( 100% working )

2. kingson pcie hyperx predator 480gb ( install this you will get lag of boot in to bios. I install in slot 4)

3. Ocz revodrive x2 240gb ( 100% working )

This only in my experience. if you guy have other experience let's share

My alienware can run 2 titanx sli but not 3  

Install 3 titan x  after turn on  for 5 sec gone off automatic

One more thing if you install other motherboard you have to check panel on this picture if the same order is fine.

On,off,rest,hdd light

I think all msi motherboard are the same order.

It works for me!!!

Entering late in the discussion, and rusty on Windows, but here's what I've seen:

System: New (refurb) area 51r2 with 5930k and 2xGTX 980

New SSD: Samsung 950 Pro M2 (using Lycom PCIe adapter), along with 2x Sandisk Ultra II SATA 960GB SSD (RAID 0)

Results: 950 Pro works fine as Win 10 boot, pair of Sandisks work fine as striped RAID 0 data drives

Benchmarks: 950 Pro M2 (~1,600 read/1,500 Write)  SATA RAID 0 (~950 read, 850 write)

These are preliminary benchmarks, using tools that Samsung provided. I'm a bit rusty on the Windows world, so I need to poke around a bit.

A few things:

1. I had trouble booting from the 950 Pro M2, until I used the Samsung migration utility. After that, my M2 booted just fine.

2. My Area 52 BIOS says it's PCIe v3.0, and apparently my BIOS is the June '15 revision

3. I'm using the small PCIe slot (X4), and not the third open GPU slot (X16). I may try that one, to see if I can get faster than 1,600/1,500? But really, that's screaming fats for me. It's 3x faster than what I was seeing with one SATA SSD, and almost 2x faster than what I'm seeing from my RAID 0 array. Primary reason I went with NVMe for my main drive is I wasn't comfortable with a striped array for my OS/Boot drive.

4. Wondering whether I could leverage the M.2 wireless slot, as I don't even run this system wirelessly, and could certainly leverage the X1 slot for a 3rd party card if I ever did? But for now, 1,600/1,500 is fast enough for me.  

Hope this helps?

That's an interesting way you got the 950 to work. I had a 951 with the same adaptor but was not successful to get it to boot. Bios never recognized the drive. And I didn't look for the migration software though I did see it on the Samsung site but never made the connection.

I've been looking at a Edge Boost PCIe 3.0 SSD for my Area 51 R2. This one uses SATA power but connects in the PCIe slot. Your solution sounds tempting but I'm still wondering since you used the software to get it to boot, now can you do a clean install on the drive and still get the same results?

I wouldn't want to be stuck with the same cloned version for ever.

hope it works out in the long run for you. Should just be able to stick a USB drive and load the OS with  no problems....Never happens =(

Couple of last questions.

What size drive did you get?

And if you go into the bios, does it show the 950 as the first drive in the boot order?

Not sure what the long-term repurcussions would be, from the way in which I cloned the drive?. Honestly, being somewhat out of touch with the latest Windows builds, I used the Samsung utility because it was free. I did try to go about the system-rester USB drive, prior to that, and had some trouble making the NVMe be a boot drive. But the Samsung utility fixed that. I made a local copy of the utility to use, if I ever have future troubles, but don;t think I'll have any long-term baggage as a result. I suspect that the Samsung utility copied over their drives, in addition to the cloning, but I really didn't verify whether that was the case. Salient point is, everything is now working well.

Anyhow, my objective has been reached. I now have a screaming fast boot drive (1,600/1,500), along with a fairly fast data drive as well (2TB SSD @ ~900/850 RAID 0). Bought all three drives for a pretty good discount on Black Friday, so I'm good to go.  While the 950 Pro states it supports speeds up to 2,500 reads, I really don't know aha that hypothetical bomb would buy me. I suspect that, after 1k, we're just talking academic speeds & feeds, anyhow.  

Now to wade through the myriad of backup software to find something with a price-performance-simplicity  mix that suits my needs.

I am, BTW, one of the few residents of the planet Earth who is switching from Mac to PC, which is why I'm doing all this... LOL

Yeah, not sure why the USB drive install didn't take, but I'm not sweating it. I have enough internal drives too make things work, and now just muddling through which long-term backup/snap utility I want to settle on. But I will admit it's pretty fun to see just how fast these SSDs are. I'm starting out with a fairly bare-bones page, which is under 60GB. Shuffling that about of data across these SSDs seems to take about a minute. We truly do live in interesting times... LOL

Yep, it makes sense that the migration utility would have left the source drive as-is, because wiping it would have been a pretty big leap of faith. But I'm not too worries, as I can reformat form another OS (OS X or LINUX), or just pop it in a USB-3 enclosure. And really, my only potential plan for this little drive is to eventually use it as cache for a spinner anyhow, which I'm in no hurry to configure.

And yeah, I'm OK with having a foot in both the Apple and MS worlds. But Apple's latest moves have me reconsidering it as my primary platform. I've had good luck with Win 10 on a SP3 as well as an XPS 13. And I'm getting pretty tired of Apple's recent move towards disposable systems. At this point, there's almost nothing you can change on any of Apple's systems, except for a few proprietary components on the overpriced Mac Pro. and even the Mac Pro expansion is very limited, with only a couple GPUs supported, and one proprietary SSD slot. I got tired of having to buy a new system every time I wanted too upgrade a drive or change a GPU, so I'm dabbling my toes back into the PC desktop market. Also, Apple's recent shift of its ecosystem from on-premise sharing to everything in iCloud doesn't bode well with me. I really don't want to have to post my ~3TB of family photos and videos on iCloud, which means the Apple photo app no longer works for us as a home solution.

So far, with this PC, so good.