Why does my M.2 drive disappear while installing or playing games?
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MellowPine42
My PC has a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 3080 Ti, two Samsung 990 Pro 4TB NVMe drives, and a 500GB Seagate FireCuda NVMe drive in a 1000W Asus Gold system. Windows is installed on the FireCuda as drive C:, while the two 990 Pros are assigned drive letters D: and F: for games. When I install or play a game, whichever M.2 drive is being used sometimes suddenly disappears from Disk Management or Device Manager. This can happen regardless of which drive contains the game. A repair shop claimed it happens because some game files are written to the Windows drive, but that explanation doesn't seem convincing. Samsung Magician also reported one drive reaching around 100°C, although I'm not sure whether that reading is accurate.
Answers
Also check the motherboard manual for lane sharing. Some M.2 slots disable or share bandwidth with SATA ports or PCIe slots, and a poorly seated drive or marginal slot can cause intermittent disconnects under load. Back up anything important first, then reseat the drives and test them individually. If one drive fails across multiple slots and systems, it may be defective.
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Files being placed on the Windows drive should not make another NVMe drive disappear. That sounds more like a hardware, firmware, thermal, motherboard-slot, or PCIe connection problem. Check the actual drive temperatures with another monitoring tool, update the motherboard BIOS and SSD firmware, and review Windows Event Viewer for disk, stornvme, or controller errors. If possible, test each drive by itself in a different M.2 slot.
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A reported 100°C is a major warning sign if it’s the SSD controller temperature. Make sure every drive has the motherboard heatsink installed correctly, remove any plastic film from the thermal pad, and confirm the heatsink is making contact. Excessive heat can cause an NVMe drive to shut down temporarily or drop off the PCIe bus.
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MellowPine42: Samsung Magician showed the drive at 100°C, but I wasn’t sure whether that was a bad sensor reading. I’ll verify it with another utility and check the heatsink contact.