topic Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard in Solid State Drives (NAND)

Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

CChon3 — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:41:01 GMT

Does the P3700 SSD actually populate values into Intel SMBus slave device 53h?

I have this SMBus issue on one Z97 motherboard (ASUS Maximus VII Gene) but not on another Z97 motherboard (ASROCK Z97M Pro 4).

As far as I know, 53h is supposed to contain DIMM SPD data for memory slot B2, when any RAM is populated in slot B1/B2 while the P3700 SSD is populated in any of the PCI Express slots on the Maximus VII Gene motherboard will result in a memory error (no boot).

I am trying to figure out who should I be looking for a fix to this issue, Intel or Asus?

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

Jose_H_Intel1 — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 22:57:28 GMT

Do you know if the BIOS from the ASUS motherboard support UEFI 2.3.1?

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

CChon3 — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 13:38:51 GMT

I do. Running the UEFI Shell on my ASUS motherboard, I type in "ver" from the EFI Shell prompt, this is the result:

EFI Specification: 2.31

EFI Vendor: American Megatrends

EFI Revision: 4.655

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

Jose_H_Intel1 — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 20:09:15 GMT

I managed to get some answers to the questions you asked above:

Yes, PCIe SSD's are technically 'memory' devices.
The change to correct this will most likely need to come from ASUS. We do not currently have a Maximus VII Gene board, but we will test a similar configuration to see if we can recreate this issue.

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

CChon3 — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 15:01:38 GMT

1. Why does it have to be 53h (and not somewhere else)? I am pretty sure all the recent PCHs (Cougar Point, Panther Point, Lynx Point) use 50h-53h on the SMBus for DIMM SPD data. I know that Patsburg (and maybe Wellsburg) is the exception to this (where DIMM SPD data is at a different location).

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

Jose_H_Intel1 — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:02 GMT

Please allow us more time to investigate.

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

CChon3 — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 17:06:18 GMT

Any updates?

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

idata — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 02:03:05 GMT

53h is the correct location for the VPD (Vital Product Data) per the SSD Form Factor specification. The Intel® SSD DC P3700/P3600 series drives are targeted for Data Center Servers and Storage appliances. These systems generally use a MUX to allow multiple devices to share resources.

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

CChon3 — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 13:12:09 GMT

One last question:

Will the P3700 work even if 3.3Vaux is not supplied by the system (as per Chapter 7.5, 2nd paragraph of Enterprise SSD Form Factor 1.0a Specification)?

http://www.ssdformfactor.org/docs/SSD_Form_Factor_Version1_a.pdf http://www.ssdformfactor.org/docs/SSD_Form_Factor_Version1_a.pdf

Re: Intel P3700 compatibility with Z97 motherboard

ASouz7 — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:23:31 GMT

Hello ClementChong,

We are going to verify on this for you and will let you know soon. Please allow us some time to check further on this matter.