I'm having trouble getting my Samsung NVMe SSDs to be recognized by my motherboard in certain M.2 slots. I'm using a MAG Z590 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard with an 11th Gen CPU. I have a Samsung 1TB 980 PRO that's working perfectly in the first M.2 slot. However, when I tried to use a Samsung 1TB 980 in one of the other M.2 slots, it doesn't show up in the BIOS or Disk Management—it just shows as not present. I also tested a 256GB SK Hynix NVMe in all slots, and it worked fine everywhere. I even swapped my 980 PRO around to check all slots, and it wasn't recognized in the other ones either, but the new 980 works great in the first slot. Since I'm not using anything in the SATA ports, I'm confused about what's going wrong. I've reseated the drives, tried them without the heatsink, updated the BIOS and firmware, and they are listed as compatible on MSI's website.
3 Answers
Just a thought, but make sure that the drives aren't SATA-only models. If they were, you wouldn’t have been able to insert them correctly since they have different keying. But it sounds like you already verified they’re NVMe based on their key type.
Have you checked the PCIe lanes? Your motherboard manual should specify if the M.2 slots get disabled when certain devices are connected. That might explain why your other NVMe drives aren’t recognized.
It might be that those specific Samsung drives are recognized differently than the SK Hynix. In your manual, it states that all slots support M Key for NVMe, so they should be good. Just keep in mind that different SSDs can sometimes act up depending on the motherboard’s compatibility.
In the manual, it confirms that all slots support NVMe, but it's just frustrating that they won't work together.
Yeah, I noticed in the manual that the other M.2 slots can get disabled if SATA ports 2, 5, or 6 are used, but I'm not using any of them.