Not sure if you ever figured this out, but those two aren’t compatible. SSD’s can either use SATA or PCIe, MTS800 uses SATA and Z97-AR uses PCIe on the M.2 slot. As far as adapters go I have no idea.

You’ve probably already figured this out, but Samsung is intentionally underestimating the endurance of their 850 Pro. They’re basically saying, “Hey, the 850 Pro may last longer, but we will not cover warranties on that drive if you go past our semi-arbitrary limit.”

Chances are that the 850 Pro is more durable than the Transcend by a lot. The older, less durable 840 Pro (256GB) survived over 2PB of Writes in Tech Report’s (in)famous SSD Endurance Experiment. I forgot the Endurance Rating for the 840 Pro, but I assume it wasn’t any more than the 850 Pro, let lone 2PB of Writes.

Samsung’s Endurance Ratings, and most other SSD companies’, only exist to tell consumers how many writes they are willing to accept when considering warranties. This also serves the dual purpose of directing people who’re planning on using SSDs for heavier workloads to go for the more expensive enterprise class drives. These enterprise drives will be typically covered by a more agreeable warranty and optimized for heavier workloads.

Again, Samsung’s provided Endurance Ratings does not actually tell their various drives true endurance. Most of their newer SSDs (830 and newer) will be able to handle writes far in excess of their Endurance Ratings; this is something true for all the decent SSD manufacturers. The Endurance Ratings only exist to serve warranty purposes, product diversification, and indication for minimum write endurance.

The (true) Write Endurance for a SSD will be determined by a number of factors including amount of NAND, NAND quality, NAND type (MLC, TLC, etc . . .), node size of NAND, and et cetera.

Here’re some links for you:

https://anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand
https://anandtech.com/show/8239/update-on-samsung-850-pro-endurance-vnand-die-size
https://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment
https://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

If you have trouble understanding anything in those links, try these:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2738
https://anandtech.com/show/5067/understanding-tlc-nand

did you ever fix that problem? i’m about to order the same drive and i have the same mother board Asus 97z ar.

thanks