Asus B150M-C with 970 Evo NvMe and SATA drive

[dkahrendt]

I just installed the Samsung 970 NvMe SSD (500GB) into this motherboard and all works well as long as I leave the 500 GB Western Digital hard drive connected. Without the physical presence of the HD the system is very unstable and will crash within a few minutes. Currently the HD is disabled in the Device Manager so it's not usable but it needs to be connected - both power and data. Is there some requirement that this motherboard have something connected to the SATA ports? I do have a SATA DVD drive connected but apparently that's not enough.

 

[Lutfij]

How is the NVMe SSD connected to the motherboard? There are no M.2 slots on the motherboard.

 

[dkahrendt]

I'm using this: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6V883F4023 It's a PCIe to M.2 adapter. It's currently installed in the PCIe X16 slot closest to the edge of the board. I think it's labeled #2.

 

[dkahrendt]

To add another detail to this issue. I had also tried moving the DVD drive from SATA 2 to SATA 1 without the HD but that didn't fix the issue. I replaced the hard drive with a physically broken SATA DVD drive and all is still well. I'm beginning to think that this is an issue with this MB design in that it gets unhappy if the first 2 SATA ports are left open.