I have a strange issue that's doing my head in, and I'd love some help…so thanks in advance!
I have a Z390 Aorus Elite mobo, 8700K processor, and a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro as the boot drive. There's 2 HDDs and a BD drive on the SATA slots, and the PCIE slots have a sound card (x1 slot), a Strix 1080 Ti (x16 slot), a TB3 add-in card and a PCIe Wifi card. Currently the SSD is installed in the "M2M" slot of the motherboard (the lower slot). PSU is eVGA 850 G2 gold.
I added a Kingston A2000 today into the "M2A" slot (the upper M2 slot). And that's where the weirdness starts…
With the second SSD, the system gets very bizzare with bootup, and especially with shutting down. It mostly boots normally into windows, but occasionally it shows the Windows logo, then both monitors go to sleep and the PC remains unresponsive. However, shutting down is problematic. If I choose shut down from the windows power options, Windows shuts down normally but the motherboard doesn't. Fans keep spinning and motherboard RGB stays on. I have to turn off the power at the PSU switch.
Removing the A2000 SSD returns the PC back to normal. Fast boot is disabled in BIOS, and in boot priority I have disabled all drives except the actual boot drive.
What could be the issue here? The new SSD hasn't even been formatted yet…should I just return it?
TIA!
Strange Issue with New SSD
Comments
TLDR: I have a genuine issue, and I'm an old member here.
If it's a second M.2 SSD, perhaps there's conflict's with the SATA ports that you've got connected for any other drives.
Many motherboards will 'steal' the existing SATA lanes to go to an M.2 drive - for my Z490, it says in fine print that a SATA M.2 will steal SATA port 5, and an NVMe drive will take both 5 and 6. It's not very well known (nor commonly encountered) but as you're using a SATA drive as a boot drive, that might be the cause of your problems.
Existing boot drive is also nvme… I've got 1 nvme boot drive and 2 sata HDDs, and 1 bd drive on sata
Try updating your BIOS if you haven't already.
I'd also swap your 960 Pro to the upper M.2 slot; generally this is the 'first' slot, and because it's not sharing data lines with the SATA ports, then that'll rule that out as a problem for your boot drive. It's a shot in the dark, but it might work…
Your manual does indeed show on p15 that the bottom/lowest two SATA ports get disabled - but these should have already been disabled if you were using the M2M slot anyway. Double check EXACTLY which SATA ports you're plugged into as per p16.
I'll have a look at that, I think the chipset just cant handle every lane to be occupied I guess
TL;DR OP is a ghost account of the person that melts their computer and makes fires