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.

[Cheairnyndahl]

I had the issue on 0223 as well, which was the BIOS my motherboard shipped with (and I believe it's the release BIOS for the board) - but yeah I think it's a glitch in the motherboard's software, gotta be, because of the fact that it happens in the BIOS level, and I've seen it happen where it'll disappear, I change absolutely nothing, reboot, and it's there again.  Doesn't make any sense.

[Fwazzy]

Here’s what seems to have fixed the issue for me:

Before swapping SSDs around, I restarted my system to see what would happen. It booted straight into the BIOS, showing no bootable drive present, although my storage SSD was visible in the NVMe controller. Restarting again resolved this temporarily. Upon inspecting my setup, I realized my OS SSD was installed in the M.2_2 slot, and my storage SSD was in M.2_3 (I had mistakenly reversed them in my previous post).

I moved my OS SSD to the M.2_1 slot and my storage SSD to the M.2_4 slot. Upon starting up and entering the BIOS, I immediately saw both SSDs listed in the boot menu. Previously, only the OS SSD would appear in the boot menu. After this change, the system loaded without any issues.

I ran another UserBenchmark test, and this time, both SSDs passed without any failures, and the test completed successfully. My CPU and GPU performance seems slightly underpowered, but I haven’t done any overclocking.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/69051475

On the topic of the GPU: it’s now running at full PCIe @ 16x4.0, whereas before, it was running at 8x4.0 when I had the SSDs installed in the M.2_2 and M.2_3 slots. This fix feels almost too simple, especially considering the marketing around the top three slots being Gen 5. In reality, it seems you can only fully utilize one of them at a time.

Hopefully, this helps someone else who encounters the same problem. I’ll continue to monitor my system and will update if the issue returns.

[Cheairnyndahl]

Well it does specify in the manual for the motherboard that "If M.2-2 and/or M.2-3 are occupied, the PCIe x16 slot is reduced to x8 bandwidth" so that is expected behavior.

All 3 slots should work without any issues, which is why this is such a big complaint that they need to look in to more closely. What I think is annoying is the fact that if you have 3 PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives installed in them, it STILL gimps the GPU slot to x8 even though it shouldn't have to given the bandwidth for all 3 of those M.2 drives is barely enough to saturate the bandwidth of single x4 5.0 slot, unless you're hammering all 3 of them at once.

Switching drives out of M.2-2 & M.2-3 will definitely "fix" the issue of the drive disappearing, but we're paying for 5 M.2 slots, we should be able to use all 5 M.2 slots, when it literally says in the Manual that all 5 should be useable at the same time (with the caveat that the GPU slot is cut down to x8 when slot 2 & 3 are occupied).

I wish this forum was actually monitored by Asus Tech Support and we could get a response from them about this, because that's now 5 different people I've found having a similar or the same issue as me, 1 on a X870E Hero & all of the rest of us are on the X870E-E Strix board.

[Psamtik]

Direct from the manual and specification page.

** M.2_2 & M.2_3 slots share bandwidth with PCIEX16(G5). When M.2_2 & M.2_3 are occupied with SSD devices, PCIEX16(G5) will run x8 only.

No or just &, that makes it sound like it only does it if both are filled as opposed to either.

[hydrus]

Other people have this same problem too. I have an ROG Strix 870e-e gaming wifi board. One user made a video here: https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/overclocking-tweaking/problems-with-x870e-hero-motherboard-and-expo-pr...  Seems like the latest beta BIOS 0701 or 0704 might resolve the issue. I had the same Samsung 990 pro 4 TB and the only thing that worked was physically moving to the M_2.1 slot. For me though, this board has been unstable with EXPO profiles and multiple different sets of RAM. Everything is on the QVL and nothing seems to fix it. 

[Cheairnyndahl]

Thank you for the BIOS update suggestion, I will have to test that if the issue arises again, oddly enough, it STILL has yet to occur again - I'm still running the 104MHz ECLK OC with the 6200MHz CL28 RAM and 2067MHz FCLK.  I've now played over 10 hours of Dragon Age Veilguard, run it through OCCT testing, and a few others, as well as more than one 30-60min run of Cinebench R23, hasn't failed anything as yet or crashed the game once.

I'm in the process of reviving my liquid cooling open loop, got a new block that's AM5 compatible coming in tomorrow (Monday), just gotta get the loop put back together... I'm going full overkill and putting the 480mm x 60mm radiator I had in my old loop after the RTX 3090 Kingpin I had at the time, in anticipation of the 9950X3D I'll be getting later... not that it will NEED that much radiator, but I'd rather have too much radiator than not enough...

And I figured running the 480mm as intake in the front is better than running the 360 x 38mm I have on top, as it would sucking in warm air off the RAM & the GPU's passthrough exhaust air, which I've measured as high as 37C before, I have a Temp Sensor there hooked up to the motherboard that controls the fans in the GPU's area, one of which is on the passthrough area sucking air through it even with the GPU fans are off, which I have them set to only turn on when the GPU core is at 30C edge temp, so they're off a lot, thanks to that fan on top of the passthrough giving it some semi-passive cooling.  I don't see the 480mm x 60mm radiator having issues keeping the 9950X3D cool, and if it turns out it's spitting hot fire after the CPU upgrade, I'll just reverse my case airflow like I did with the 5950X/3090 Kingpin setup & have the top & back as intake with the front as exhaust.

I love this case. I'm going to be really sad if I ever break anything on it that makes it unusable.

[Fwazzy]

I've been bench-testing for a few days without drive issues after moving the SSDs. I now have SSDs in slots 1, 4, and 5, leaving slots 2 and 3 empty.

However, I'm experiencing system lag for about 5-10 seconds after exiting games. FPS drops to 10, and the mouse moves sluggishly until the game client reloads on the desktop. This happens with all games and their clients, such as exiting full-screen League of Legends or Team Fight Tactics to the smaller Riot client. I didn’t encounter this issue when SSDs were in slots 2 and 3, but I also didn’t play many games then. Has anyone experienced this? Could the SSD configuration be a factor?

[Cheairnyndahl]

Yeah the disappearing act only happens on M.2-2 or M.2-3, for me M.2-3 only disappears if I enable the GPU+M.2 Storage option in BIOS, M.2-2 is the one that was disappearing randomly for no apparent reason.

M.2-4 & M.2-5 are running off the chipset, so they should never have any issues.  I think the problem lies in the BIOS not properly toggling things on and off that need to be on or off when it comes to having 3 M.2s all operating off the CPU, which if you have M.2-1 thru -3 populated, that's 3 drives (with all 3 slots being PCIe 5.0 capable), all running off the CPU - something AMD has not had before to the best of my knowledge. 

I find it really irritating that there's no throughput If/Ands/Buts when it comes to what kind of drives are actually installed, in terms of how much bandwidth they take... For instance, all of my drives are Gen4 - why does this still effect the GPU not being able to have all it's 5.0 lanes? A set of 3x PCIe 5.0 x4 lane set, which is what a M.2 slot is, should be able to run at 4.0 x4 speeds for those drives, and still have enough lanes left over to not slow the GPU slot... but I'm guessing that's just not something they wired for, or however that works, not an expert on that crap.

As for the system lag issue, have you tested the drives in those slots to confirm they're running at full speed & not running hot? I ask because the drives I have in those slots run a fair bit hotter than the ones under the bigger heatsinks of the 1-3 slots, I.E. My C drive (990 Pro 2TB) is in M.2-1 and idles at 31C drive temp/33C Drive Temp 3 (which is the controller), whereas my D drive (also a 990 Pro 2TB) is in M.2-4 idles at 39C drive temp/42C Drive Temp 3.  And that spread only gets bigger under load.  Only pointing that out because MAYBE the thermal pads aren't making good contact & it's a thermal throttling issue, something worth checking.

I know when I first put my drives in & changed some of the thermal pads, I found that because the ADATA 4TB drive is double-sided and a bit thicker than most as a result, it was indenting in thermal pad A LOT, while the other drive under that double heatsink for M-2.2 & M-2.3 was barely touching the thermal pad at all with barely any impression, so I put a bit thicker pad on it... I was going to just make the pad on the ADATA drive thinner, but it's smooshed on the heatsink so well that it started falling apart when I tried to peel it off lol

[Psamtik]

Just setup my system and have the exact same issue, but only when I use EXPO or DOCP as I tried it with 3 different sets of RAM though all Corsair Vengeance RGB, 2x24GB 6000 DOCP SR Hynix, 2x32GB 6400 DOCP DR Hynix, and 2x16GB 6000 EXPO SR Samsung. As soon as I enable EXPO or DOCP, the 2 drives disappear, though sometimes it shows 1 of them but only displays correctly if I turn the power off an on again instead and then neither of those drives show. 

I have 9800X3D, 5x 2TB Samsung 990 Pro and MSI 4090, with 2x Samsung 1TB 870 EVO and 2x 2TB 870 QVO. I have removed all the drives but the the first 3 and still get the same issue. 

I also updated the BIOS right away to guarantee 9800X3D support, which also removed the X3D overclock option  (the one that just sets it asynchronous and 103/100) and I don't know if its now meant to be there, but the gaming mode option for the multi CCD X3D CPUs that disappeared after the first reset when updating or clearing  the bios on my X670E-F with the 7800X3D. 

Maybe its not detecting the CPU correctly and its behaving like an 8000 CPU is in the slot when RAM overclocking is enabled, es[pecially when its so buggy about doing so and sometimes wont show correctly that it only sees 1 CPU and 2 chipset slots working until you power off and back on.

Currently its working with ram on Auto and 4800mt, which isn't ideal just as removing 2 of the drives to run at full OC RAM speeds is not ideal.

[Psamtik]

You can't seem win with this board, I finally get all 5 drives working and RAM set to full speed (I left the DOCP/EXPO setting to auto and then used the bios settings for Hynix 6400 2x32GB DR and set the speed to 6400 and the fclk to 2133) but now its round 3 of fail and I am stuck at 8X on the GPU slot. 

The main reason I got this board was for the 5x onboard NVMe slots, but you can't seem to win as those top 3 are CPU linked and if I recall, the 9800X3D has only 24 pcie lanes, but I assumed Asus knew something we didn't and it only dropped to 8X if the PCIE x16 slot and the drives in those 2 slots were PCIe 5.0, as thats how it comes across with the description. My X670E-F can run the 5 NVMe drives with one on a card in the 4X slot, which seems the only option I have on this now or effectively run my 4090 at PCIe 3.0. 

I know its not much of a cut to performance in most games, but that unclear ** on the slots is clearly leading to confusion on what we get here. Hopefully I can go back to my X670E-F layout and it will work, which it should unless this board is less capable than an older version, with the only reason I am not more annoyed right now is that the I got this board so I could use the 7800X3D in another PC, which it seems is going to be getting one of these 2TB drives, as thinking I had a room for another drive on the PCIe slot card, I ordered a black friday deal 4TB 990 Pro. 

Edit

Going back to the ROG Strix X670E-F as this is a downgrade in my opinion as you can only have 3 drives without being forced into x8 unlike the X670E-F, not to mention no ram issues. I could honestly not recommend this board or others like it due to unclear description that could be read as only doing it if they are PCIE 5.0 and/or only with both slots filled, which doesn't put much faith in other areas.