New Asus X870E Strix board - M.2 drive disappearing

[Cheairnyndahl]

Hello, just installed my new Asus X870E-E Strix motherboard, loving it so far. When I initially got in to Windows, all of my drives were present (even the new one that wasn't formatted yet was showing in Disk Management) - I updated everything in terms of latest drivers for the motherboard etc, rebooted and enabled EXPO on my RAM, set to 6000MHz with voltages set, didn't touch any other settings...

And now one of my M.2 drives is not showing up in BIOS or in Windows?  I've tried changing the BIOS setting for Bifurcation to GPU+M.2 mode, that doesn't help.  Any suggestions as to what else I can try?  I have a feeling it's related to the whole thing of the GPU slot & the M.2-2 & M.2-3 sharing bandwidth, but the drive that's in one of them is showing up while the other is not now.
I'm going to try disabling EXPO & see if that helps for some reason... wouldn't make any sense if that was it, but perhaps the BIOS version I'm on is messing something up.

[Inugami0909]

메인보드 불량 입니다.  당장 교환받으세요

24년 10월31일 발생해서  ASUS 에 문의 해보았지만  제대로 된 답변을 하지 않고

ssd와 CPU가 문제라고 합니다.

메인보드 문제가 아닐거라고 했지만 결국 메인보드가 문제였습니다.

EXPO 활성화시  M.2 SSD  3번슬롯이 죽어버립니다!

[Inugami0909]

It's a motherboard defect.
After installing an SSD in the M.2 3rd slot
When EXPO is activated, slots 2 and 3 are deactivated.
Only slot 1 is alive.
When EXPO is activated, slots 2 and 3 are dead.
It's a motherboard defect.
Please replace the motherboard
The symptom will disappear.
I discovered it on October 30, 2024 and told ASUS about the motherboard defect on October 31, 2024, but they ignored it and said that it was a SSD and CPU defect. However, it was a motherboard defect.

[Inugami0909]

Since the symptoms disappeared after replacing the motherboard,
it means that BIOS may not be able to solve the problem.
I tried all versions of BIOS to solve this problem.

[Haadis]

Are you telling us now that everyone that has issues with Ram Profile an desapearing m.2 has a defect board??

[Cheairnyndahl]

I think a fair bit of it is either a motherboard issue that needs to be returned for RMA, or try re-doing your CPU & m.2 installs to make sure they're fully seated if you haven't already. Because I did both of those during my time in chat with an Asus Tech, the problem occurred again, then I decided F it & went in to full on messing with RAM settings, the drives reappeared randomly and haven't disappeared since.

I've changed so much that if settings were causing it still, it would've happened by now. I'm currently running with EXPO enabled (as it's required for asynchronous ECLK OCing), with custom tightened timings and voltages, 104MHz ECLK which makes the CPU run at up to 5.25GHz low load boost (1-2 cores) with ~5.05GHz all core boost, without any additional voltage (curve optimizer is set to 0 currently), all 6 M.2s installed (one in a Sabrent m.2 x4 4.0 card). Issue still hasn't happened again. This is on 0606 BIOS as I haven't updated to the newer one yet. 

[Cheairnyndahl]

Beginning to think my 980 Pro 2TB just has issues. I bought aftermarket m.2 heatsinks for the bottom 2 m.2 slots because the plate that's on them makes them share heat & I don't like that... It still runs warmer than the others. Now that it's on its own heatsink, the other m.2 that was sharing the plate with it is running cooler.

Should be noted that area is almost completely under then GPU's heatsink shroud so airflow is pretty limited. I've put a fan in the area to help, but the 990 Pro that's in the other slot down there is running 2-4C cooler IDLE compared to the 980 Pro. 

But, still haven't had a drive disappear on me again, yet. Hoping it doesn't occur again. 

[Cheairnyndahl]

I do believe I cursed myself lol

All I did was rearrange my drives in terms of which was in what slot & took one out that I'm going to replace because it's old, and now m.2-2 is gone again, only way I got it to come back was load optimized defaults & it doesn't stay no matter what I do. I've tried manual RAM timings, running at stock with just the RAM tuned, no dice. Any time I mess with any settings in reference to the CPU, FCLK or RAM it disappears after the training restart. I'm basically redone things so I'm just not using that slot currently. Very annoying.

I'm going to update bios on Monday (my first day off of my work weekend) and see if that makes any difference. Really wishing if just RMAed the board with Amazon when I could've lol

[Cheairnyndahl]

Another update: I loaded the profile from when all the drives last showed up after putting a drive back in that slot, with the ECLK OC etc, and suddenly it's back to working again lol 

I did see that just changing something as simple as the PPT setting in PBO to a different wattage made it disappear again though. To me that's crazy & really makes it seem like this is a BIOS issue they just haven't ironed out because it's not present on all boards. 

[Fwazzy]

Have you tried the latest bios update that came out a week ago or so?

[Cheairnyndahl]

Planning to test it tomorrow.