NVMe Driver For Intel 600p, And SMART Data Issue

[idata]

I noticed that Intel does not include a Driver/software link for the new 600p M.2 SSDs in their ARK information pages.

SSDs like the Intel 750 that I use, have a full compliment of software, as well as the Intel NVMe driver. The 600p does not (yet?) have a driver download available, or is it meant to be used with the Microsoft stornvme.sys inbox driver? I haven't tried to install the Intel NVMe driver yet.

Also, I know the Intel SSD Toolbox does not yet support the 600p, but one of the reasons it doesn't has other side affects. The current version of the SSD Toolbox does not recognize that SMART is enabled on the 600p, or at least it tells the user that SMART is not enabled.

Otherwise, a non-Intel SSD's SMART attributes are displayed fine by the Toolbox. That seems to confirm that SMART is enabled on this PC, and I've never had trouble with SMART data retrieval in the past on this PC.

Some if not all third party programs that display SMART data, or use it to evaluate a drive's health, are also unable retrieve the 600p's SMART data. In some cases, the program interprets the inability to access the 600p's SMART data as an indication the SSD has failed, and flags the drive as failed. While I realize what the problem in general is, other users might not, so you may be seeing questions in this forum about that.

Frankly, since the SMART data issue with the 600p is not isolated to the SSD Toolbox, I would not be surprised if a firmware update will be necessary.

[kkent3]

The support for Intel 600p SSD is coming in Q4

[idata]

Hello Parsec,

Thanks for posting in our forum, we would like to let you know that for this drive we do not provide NVMe* drivers as they will be supported with the in-box driver that comes with the operating system.This means that the NVMe* driver we have in the download website will not work with theses drives.As you can see on this http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/ssd-600p-brief.pdf link, on page 2 where it says "Software Tools" it states the Intel® Solid State Drive Toolbox will be available in November 2016.Please let us know if you have any other question and we will keep the thread updated if the software is released before November 2016.Regards,NC

[idata]

Thanks for the responses. I knew the Toolbox update was scheduled for Q4 2016, but I did not see Note 9 in the 600p Product brief.

Can we expect the 600p's Product Specifications to be available by the end of Q4 2016?

I was just curious about the NVMe driver. When the first NVMe SSDs for PCs were released, there was some controversy about the Microsoft NVMe driver causing poor write performance, but that has faded away.

Whatever is happening with the 600p regarding SMART data, I was surprised another program was unable to read it, initially. It otherwise recognized the 600p and can apparently read the total host reads and writes. That data usually is provided by various SMART attributes. I'll wait for the official specification document for more information about SMART data support.

I'm using a 600p as the OS drive (Windows 10) in a small PC, and I think it is a very good product. The ARK specifications state that the 600p does not support Temperature Monitoring and Logging.

http://ark.intel.com/products/94926/Intel-SSD-600p-Series-1_0TB-M_2-80mm-PCIe-3_0-x4-3D1-TLC http://ark.intel.com/products/94926/Intel-SSD-600p-Series-1_0TB-M_2-80mm-PCIe-3_0-x4-3D1-TLC

A third party monitoring program I use displays the 600p's temperature, which changes over time with the load on it. The 600p idles cooler than two other NVMe M.2 SSDs I have, even in a small PC case with limited ventilation. I'm confident that the 600p's has temperature monitoring capabilities of some kind, if not logging.

[idata]

Hello Parsec,

Thanks for bringing all these questions, we will be checking for the documentation and for more information about the temperature and SMART details on it.Please allow us some time to research on this and we will get back to you.Regards,NC