Scratched everything before.
Doing some quick research:
Windows
Windows highly prefers 8.1/10 since they have built in NVMe drivers. You could definitely see the driver at the OS level, but not so sure at the BIOS.
Also, preferably an Intel Processor released 2015 or later (Broadwell Xeons/Skylake Desktop CPU's).
EFI needs to be set on the PCIe or M.2 slot, in which the device is installed in.
Motherboard needs to support UEFI mode, some may require a BIOS update; but best if you just did a BIOS update right off the bat when setting up a system with newer components anyways.
The following Linux distys have 'out-of-box' NVMe drivers:
- RHEL 6.5/7.0 (So you can also list CentOS)
- SUSE 11 SP2
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Ubuntu
Again, you can probably see it while installing the device; as long as you have the EFI set on the slot the NVMe device is installed on.
Setting the partition is the same, if you know what you're doing; a lot of instructional videos including how to setup basic Linux partitions on the NVMe device.
RHEL 7.0
'Out-of-box' drivers at least support UEFI. This article also nicely lists the naming conventions for NVMe devices:
- nvme0n1 - Device 0
- nvme0np1 - Device 0, partition 1
- nvme0np2 - Device 0, partition 2
- nvme1n1 - Device 1
- nvme1n1p1 - Device 1, partition 1
- nvme1n1p2 - Device 1, partition 2
Same article also reminds you that you can check for the device (helps if you know the manufacturer) by simply running a grep command with 'lspci'.
When partitioning these drives, make sure you are formatting the NVMe partitions to xfs.
Example:
mkfs.xfs /dev/nvme1np1
And if you know how to mount devices, the rest is pretty straightforward.