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.

[Fwazzy]

Even with the fix, would it still be better to use slots 4 & 5? For the purpose of not reducing the bandwidth to the GPU when using slots 2 & 3?

[Cheairnyndahl]

For those that have 3 drives or less (or 4 with an x4 4.0 pcie card in the bottom motherboard slot), yes, technically, but again, the performance loss is 3-7% and that's mostly high resolution or super high fps. I'm looking forward to having reliable access to all 5 drives again, assuming it works. 

[Silent_Scone]

Depends on use case, but I would safely say the I/O lost on the NVME is well worth keeping the GPU at full width if you're gaming.

[Cheairnyndahl]

I need to do more fiddling which I didn't have time for today cuz I'm helping take care of someone that's just out of major surgery when I'm not at work, BUT, it APPEARS this BIOS (1104) DOES fix the issue.  I have all 5 drives in, I've set my Async ECLK OC with the RAM tightened up to CL30 with tightened timings at 6000MHz, and all of them have showed up for several reboots (from flashing the BIOS to now, they have shown up every time).

Tomorrow I'll enable DOCP just to see if that changes anything & report back.  I also want to test if the M.2+Storage setting now works as intended or not, and vice versa, if the force x16 option works & disables the drives, as well as some other stuff.  Also gotta get those drives in the proper aftermarket heatsinks, cuz the motherboard stock one for M.2-2 & 3 isn't that bad, it's actually quite good, but the 980 Pro I have in one of those two slots is a hottie, so it could use the extra heatsinkness.

[Cheairnyndahl]

So I'm investigating currently, I think I figured out how they "fixed it", and if that is the case, that's some hogwash that's literally gimping the 2 slots to make them work.

So I went in to Armory Crate to see which drive is plugged in where, via looking at the connection speed & PCIe Standard, since the Gen5 slots are "NVM Express 2.0" and the Gen 4 slots are either 1.4 or 1.3 - in the case of my 980 Pro, for some reason it's showing NVM Express 1.3 despite it being in a Gen5 slot, and it's showing PCIe 4.0 x4 transfer mode...

The 990 Pro 2TB that is in one of the two slots of M.2-3 (I think, not positive, it's in 2 or 3) is showing NVM Express 2.0 with Transfer Mode listed at PCIe 1.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 - I immediately went "That cannot be right."

Loaded CrystalDisk, sure as F, it's running with a cap of 1000MB/s transfer speeds.  Oddly, that is also the case for my Q-drive, which is a 4TB 990 Pro, and that is in one of the bottom slots, M.2-5 I believe... so something very weird is going on with this BIOS.

I'm going to reboot & force generations in the menu to do so & see if things start disappearing again.  I literally cannot be havin' 1.0 x4 PCIe speeds on that 4TB, it holds about 50% of my games as well as a good bit of my "work" that I do rendering etc.

[Cheairnyndahl]

So I went in to BIOS, forced all M.2 slots to Gen4 via the Onboard Device Configuration PCIe Link Speed submenu - rebooted in to Windows, one drive's still listed at PCIe 1.0 x4 in Disk Info in Armory Crate, AND still running at 1000MB/s maximum speed for CrystalDisk.  The other drive did get bumped up to 4.0 x4.  I did figure out that I somehow managed to swap my 980 Pro & the 990 Pro 4TB in terms of placement in slots - they both have the exact same aftermarket heatsink on them currently so it's impossible to tell them apart - so I shut down to swap those back so that the 990 Pro 4TB is in M.2-5 (both so that it's getting better airflow, and so that it's not potentially stuck at PCIe 1.0 x4). 

The 980 Pro is now showing PCIe 4.0 x4 in slot M.2-3 with Gen4 forced in BIOS.  The 990 Pro 2TB in M.2-2 is still showing PCIe 1.0 x4 even though Gen4 is forced in BIOS, and it's still capping out at just under 1000MB/s in CrystalDisk...

So basically, it appears this way at least, they "solved" the issue by completely turning down the bandwidth on one of the two M.2 slots, so that the board can handle the x8 4.0/5.0 GPU slot, as well as 3 M.2 slots on the CPU directly (in my case, it's doing 2 x4 4.0s & the 1 1.0 x4).

This is completely unacceptable if this is the intended "fix" for this... Only other thing I can test is if it's possibly somehow the drive insertion or the drive itself that's an issue, I will try putting it in the other slot & report back, but I don't think it's the drive, I think it's the slot being turned down to 1.0 x4 to "fix" this problem of the drives disappearing...

Also, side note, after I changed the 4TB 990 Pro to M.2-5 and the 2TB 980 Pro to M.2-3, I booted up in to Windows... both M.2-2 & M.2-3 disappeared randomly again, booted in to BIOS, they reappeared, and are now present in Windows currently.

Yikes.

[Hipflask]

Have you listed what else is connected to the system anywhere? There's only so many CPU lanes...that's why the chipset lanes exist.

[DarekGra]

Hello, unfortunately the problem is still there... not only did the first BIOS flash have a problem, because the first time I booted it with the error code EC, the next boot was ok. Disks disappearing very rarely during a cold boot, but when going to sleep, the disks disappear 100%, and not only from the M2.2 and M2.3 connectors, but also from M2.4 and 5. And after about 20 sleeps, two BSoDs occurred. I won't mention the boot time of over 90 seconds with EXPO I and II. I temporarily switched to a profile without EXPO because it's a waste of nerves and the boot time is about 10-15 seconds.

Edit... it's even worse after sleep the disks disappear even without EXPO!!! Tragedy

[Fwazzy]

I also had long boot times after the update. I switched both context memory restore options from auto to enabled and that seemed to help boot faster.

[Cheairnyndahl]

Last bit of testing I did last night & forgot to post about:

I did test the drive that was showing as PCIe 1.0 x4 in both m.2-2 & m.2-3, thought maybe it was the drive as it showed the same in both, in m.2-4, and it showed correctly (PCIe 4.0 x4) and ran at full speed. So the bios is definitely forcing one or both of m.2-2 and m.2-3 to PCIe 1.0 x4 speed regardless of what you set in BIOS.

This is not a fix, if this is what the bios does to remedy the issue, this is unacceptable.