Imaging M.2 Solid-State Drives in Intel Skylake Chipset Systems

This article provides the information on "Imaging M.2 Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based Solid-State Drives (SSD) in Intel Skylake chipset systems".

Skylake and M.2 Drives

Newer Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex systems with the Intel Skylake chipset may be equipped with PCIe based M.2 Solid-State Drives (SSD) that require a new version of Intel Rapid Storage Driver (Version 14.5 or higher) to be accessible by the operating system and imaging tools.

M.2 (pronounced M-dot-two) is a small-form-factor (SFF) multi-purpose connector designed to replace the small mSATA and mini-PCIe slots currently in use.

Imaging Essential Information

Intel Rapid Storage version 14.5 is required to use PCIe based M.2 SSD drives that appear as "NVMe" disks.

The NVMe disk does not have a PCI hardware ID but is recognized by the iaStor driver.

Example: SCSI\DiskNVMe____SM951_NVMe_SAMSUBXW7

Intel Rapid Storage 14.5 is not in the Windows PE CAB files for Windows PE 3.1, 5.0, or 10 as of yet and must be downloaded from Intel directly from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/55005/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST .

You will need to download and extract the F6 driver directly to a USB thumb drive, then boot to the Windows media and load the IRST drivers:

1. Download the F6 driver depending on your processor (x86 for 32-bit processors, or x64 for 64-bit processors).

2. Extract the contents of the file to your USB drive.

3. Boot to the Windows installation media, and at the HDD selection screen, select Load drivers.

4. Select the appropriate driver based on your BIOS settings to display the HDD.

5. Proceed with the Windows installation.

The new Skylake based motherboards require Intel Rapid Storage driver 14.5.2.x or newer.