My Kingston NV2 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive causes the entire computer to power off whenever I write data to it. Copying files from the NVMe drive to another drive works, but copying files onto it, moving data within it, downloading directly to it, or even deleting files from it makes the system shut down. It does not simply restart, and I have to switch the power supply off and back on before the PC will start again.
I moved the drive to the motherboard's second M.2 slot, but the behavior stayed the same. I sent it to the manufacturer's service center, where they reported that it passed testing and had no defect. I'm planning to repeat write-stress tests when it returns and also test it in a completely different PC.
The system uses an Aorus B550 Elite motherboard, Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 32GB DDR4-3200, an RTX 4070 Ti Super, and a Seasonic G12 GC-750W power supply. Does this sound like a faulty NVMe drive, or could another component be triggering the shutdown?
2 Answers
The fact that reads work while writes, deletes, and downloads cause the failure strongly points toward something involving the drive’s write path or power behavior. However, service-center testing may not have reproduced the exact workload. Record the shutdown behavior, test with a different NVMe drive in the same slot, update the motherboard BIOS and SSD firmware, and avoid relying on the affected drive for important data until the cause is confirmed.
A complete power loss that requires switching the PSU off and back on sounds more like a protection shutdown than a normal software or file-system crash. The NVMe drive could still be triggering it during writes, but the drive alone is not proven defective yet. Testing it in another PC is a good next step; if the same write operations reliably shut down a second system, the drive is very likely bad. If it works there, investigate the motherboard, power delivery, PSU, and firmware instead.
Since the machine will not power on again until the PSU switch is cycled, I would prioritize hardware protection or power-delivery troubleshooting rather than treating this as a Windows-only problem.