NVMe M.2 SSD & Windows 7

I've realised that I'll probably give in to temptation before Christmas and install the 8Pack Haswell-E bundle I bought on Thursday. It's looking awfully tempting sitting in it's boxes!

The bundled SSD was the Samsung SM951 NVMe drive. From what I can tell, Win 7 Pro doesn't natively support it and trying to use it as a boot drive could be problematic. I may be totally wrong here.

Is there a way for me to install Windows 7 on the SM951 or should I just get Win 8.1 or 10? Which one would be better at this stage - I don't know if I trust 10 yet?

Before anyone says upgrade from 7 to 10, I'm planning on reusing the old hardware in another PC, so I'll keep 7 on it.

i think NVMe is supported on 8.1 and 10 so if you installed either of them you should be fine.

other people have had to clone their W7 install and restore the image to get W7 to work on a NVMe SSD.

i dont know too much about NVMe to be honest so wait for one of the other guys that does to come along but hope this helps

W10 is fantastic.

Thanks for the input so far guys. Hopefully some of the other guys'll chip in with their 2p!

I know that NVMe is pretty new tech, so I can understand why Windows 7 is a pain to get working as it didn't exist back then. From what I've read, supports is native from 8.1 onwards.

Problem is I keep hearing good and bad things about 10 though. On paper it looks really good, but then I hear about borked drivers etc and it puts me off. A relative has upgraded to 10, but I don't know what he did because it's caused all kinds of problems. In the end he's had to revert back to 7. On the other hand, some of my work colleagues have 10 and love it.

I did get one of the discounted SanDisk X300 512GB SSDs at the same time, but I want to use that as my games drive.

rotor, what do you run on W10? If I know my programs will work, I'll quite happily switch to 10.

Office 2016. Fujitsu ScanSnap software. iTunes. Chrome. vSphere client. Other bits and bobs...

Haven't heard a single one of my acquaintances complain about anything W10 related. I've installed it on 4 different devices at home (1 PC and 3 laptops -- the newest being 18 months old, the oldest being almost 10 years old). Every single install I've done has been seamless, and very quick (everything is on SSD for me now), and all drivers install fine, if not straight from the install media, then post install via the first automatic Windows Update.

At the end of the day this is a clean new machine; what have you got to lose? Windows 7 is now 6 years old, you will be installing a lot of drivers manually each time you rebuild.

To get a free upgrade from W7, you follow this process:

- Install W7, ensure it is activated.
- In place upgrade to W10, ensure it is activated.
- Clean install of W10 (do a diskpart clean during the install -- you hit Shift-F10 to get a command prompt). Will activate automatically (Microsoft stores your hardware signature and knows you are good to go).

I'm fully aware of how to get the free upgrade, but given I'm going to be reusing the old hardware in a different PC, I might as well get the OS now.

I think I'll run the MS upgrade advisor and see if it finds anything incompatible - it shouldn't. The price difference between 8.1/10 isn't great so if it doesn't come up with anything crazy, I'll probably switch to 10.

The main thing is if my games suddenly stop working. As I've said, I've heard of Nvidia drivers etc getting borked/being unstable.