Hey everyone! I just installed a new Samsung 990 Pro 2TB m.2 SSD and ran into a couple of issues during setup. Turns out, I had to tweak a BIOS setting to get it working correctly by enabling the PCIEX16_1+PCIEX16_2+M.2_2 option under the Advanced -> Onboard Devices Configuration menu. After that, I finally got my new drive initialized and formatted. Here's where things got weird: when I checked Disk Management, I found an extra 1TB of unallocated storage that I don't remember installing. Up until now, I've had three other 1TB m.2 drives installed along with this one, and I'm starting to wonder if this extra space is real or if there's some kind of error on my PC. For context, my setup includes four m.2 drives (1 Intel, 2 WD, and the new Samsung), an external hard drive for transferring files, an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XIII Hero motherboard, an i7 11700k CPU, a Gigabyte 5700xt GPU, and 64GB of DDR4 Corsair RAM. Could someone clarify if this extra storage is legit or if I need to be concerned about some hidden issue?
3 Answers
Here’s a screenshot of my Disk Management. C: is my Intel m.2, E and F are my two WD drives, G: is the Samsung 990 Pro, D: is my external drive, and H: is that mysterious unallocated space I'm not using anywhere. I only have four slots, and I haven’t added anything else.
To check what's going on, open Disk Management by typing it into the Start menu. That should show you all attached drives and their partitions. Typically, Windows manages three partitions on its main drive: a small EFI System partition, your C: drive, and a recovery partition. Most additional storage drives should only have one partition each.
Check out this other screenshot where I highlighted the partitions. It might help you understand how drives show up in Disk Management. Make sure that unallocated space doesn’t indicate any corruption or errors with the drive.
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