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.

[Psamtik]

Yeah seems like there is something iffy with the drive speeds. After seeing there was this issue I tried myself with a full reset to default first then, applying DOCP I then manually setting all the drives to PCIe 4.0. I should be getting closer to 12000 MB/s with my 5 raided 2TB 990 Pro (yeah those 3 chipset ones slow things down but the capacity is what I wanted and the speed is fine), but with expo/docp enabled, the drives do indeed now all appear in windows, and Crystal disk info show PCIe 4.0 x4 on each, but it showing 4400 MB/s in crystal diskmark.

 The M.2_1 4TB 990 Pro boot drive still runs at normal speeds though.

So yeah the not working seems to be fixed for me, but now its working but 1/3 the speed. Luckily going back to my manual settings remedy it, it seems like there is still work to be done on this.  

[DarekGra]

in my case there is no problem with speeds. when it detects it normally PCIe4x4, in CDM speeds Read 6800 to 6950 Write 6800-6900.
in M2.1 Read 7250 to 738 Write 6800-6950

disk disappears only after W11 sleep or after "restart"

[Cheairnyndahl]

I actually haven't even bothered with EXPO yet, all the stuff I went over above is happening with manually programmed in RAM speed & timings, with ECLK/Async OC on the CPU - but yeah, no matter what I do or which drive I put in M.2-2, 100% of the time it's showing as PCIe 1.0 x4 in Asus Armory Crate under the dashboard stuff when you go to the drive tab, all other drives (M.2-1, 4 & 5) show correctly & work at proper speeds, and as I said, I've rearranged drives & which ever one I put in M.2-2 goes to 1.0 x4 & won't go above 1000MB/s transfer speeds in CrystalDisk.

The really weird part is the fact that M.2-3 will randomly either be PCIe 4.0 x4 or PCIe 1.0 x4 - I tried setting them both to PCIe 3.0 speed in the BIOS submenu, and both of them went to 1.0 x4 lol 
I don't understand why they even put that feature in if it's going to just not listen to it at all.

But, once I can afford to, I'll very likely be switching to an Asrock Taichi (as it has all the features I want except the extra M.2 slot, and now that I have aftermarket coolers out the wazoo, I don't need the fancy heatsinks natively on the motherboard anymore) - because it only has 2 M.2 slots on the CPU & has no reports of this issue occurring. Very irritating because I do like the Asus software in terms of fan programming & lighting, etc.  But this motherboard will end up being RMAed if the problem is still persisting at that point, then I'll test the replacement to make sure it does NOT have the issue, then resell it.

Really wishing I'd just returned it to Amazon for a refund when I was still in the return window.

[DarekGra]

M2.2 and 3 must work 4x4, that's why these two slots have 8 lines assigned, only ASUS has to finally handle it with software!

[Cheairnyndahl]

So right now I only have one drive in M.2-3, no drive in M.2-2, with the other drives installed in their "new normal" spots... this is the screen I'm referring to:

SOMETIMES M.2-3 will show and work at PCIe 4.0 x4, M.2-2 I've yet to see run at PCIe 4.0 x4.  And I confirmed with GPUz while I was at it, GPU is still downgraded to PCIe 4.0 x8 with just the one drive in those two slots, running at freakin' PCIe 1.0 x4.  If THIS is what they did to "fix it", that's ridiculous.

I'm going to test trying to set it on Auto etc & see if anything actually changes it out of 1.0 x4 mode. I'm also going to test the explicit M.2+Storage & x16 Graphics Card slot settings to see if they work as expected...

[Cheairnyndahl]

Can confirm, M.2+Storage setting is STILL busted, it disables both M.2-2 & M.2-3 instead of explicitly enabling them like it's supposed to.  Setting manually to GPU x16 mode does work as intended, setting any speed on the M.2 slots manually in the Onboard Devices Configuration > PCIe link speed submenu does not change the slot speed showing in Asus Armory Crate, and the speed showing in Armory Crate IS accurate based on CrystalDisk results.

Guess I'll be going back to running just the 3 drives I absolutely have to have installed until another BIOS comes out that might actually fix the issues... or until I can afford to replace this POS motherboard.

[Cheairnyndahl]

Lil update, I've thought about reverting BIOS to see if the 1.0 x4 thing was previously present, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't and I really don't want to have to reprogram my fan profiles AGAIN for no good reason.

Since switching to a setup where I have my main windows drive in the 1 slot, my ADATA 4TB in slot 5 for airflow purposes, and because it will not lock in to place in m.2-3, because it's double sided and that slot is not compatible with aftermarket m.2 heatsinks that have double sided drives in them apparently, and my 4TB 990 Pro in slot 3 with a Thermalright HR-09 on it, haven't had any issues with disappearing, yet, but I'm also running no eclk oc, no docp, just 6000MHz CL30 RAM with tight timings. Plan is to move the 4TB 990 Pro to slot 1, and my Windows drive, which has a HR-10 Pro on it (with the fan) to slot 4, so my gpu isn't on an x8 bandwidth anymore.

I really wanna do further testing of x8 4.0 vs x16 4.0, but my game library isn't the best for titles to test with. Having a unique resolution like mine makes performance numbers very interesting depending on how the game handles the extra view angles that 5120x1440 creates. 

[Schug]

I still believe this is a bug tied to Memory Context Restore. Forcing a full train on every boot (MCR disabled) is the only thing that prevents this from happening for me every time. It sucks having to wait for the extended boot times. EXPO on/off, manual timings, setting link speeds...nothing else solves it for me. There are Asrock and MSI users with the same problem (based on their forums and Reddit).

[Cheairnyndahl]

Are you on the 1104 BIOS? And are you using both slot 2 & 3, is there any issue with the connection speeds? I'll give that a go this weekend as well just to see what happens. 

[Psamtik]

To be honest, I have given up on this now, manual fixes it for me but 1104 also means I have to tweak GPU settings again to stop random black screens, so I went back to the previous one (I get this occasionally with new bios and GPU driver coming out around the same time, but rock solid again now). MCR works for me so long as I disable the fast start, which is something I have been doing anyway since ram tweaking. This is clearly fixable, but I wouldn't be surprised if it may need a lot more work than ASUS are willing to put in as it may need a complete bios rewrite to prevent these knock on effect issues that seem to be happening, as one fix causes another right now and there are seemingly only a few of us using all 4 NVMe slots. Hopefully not and it turns out to be something easy that's been missed, but as of now, this is not a board I could recommend  and you are for the most part better off with a cheaper one if all you need are 1-3 nvme and only 2 PCIe slots. Not much use to us with it but hopefully prospective buyers see it.

Mind you this could be an AMD issue, as that USB4 requirement is clearly a lane hog as well that they never gave the extra lanes for on the CPU, so bifurcation seems to be something they have to force even for 4 slots that they didn't need to do on X670E, so maybe its an issue with the AMD code that causes a conflict with ram once you have to split the x16 slot. Maybe 3 (4 with the PCIe slot) is the magic number for X870E but you do get USB4, and 4 (5 with the PCIe slot) if you can get X670E and maybe get USB4, and this board was just over ambitious.