[SOLVED] Can't set up new m2 SSD

louis_A_man

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Jan 17, 2021
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My PC's behaviour with the drive inserted is very strange. It's a WD SN750 NVMe SSD and my motherboard is an ASROCK Z170 PRO4. With the drive inserted the whole PC is jittery and slow and borderline unusable. Takes 15 or so minutes to boot up rather than 30 seconds. At first the m2 SSD showed up in the disk utility and in the Western Digital disk management dashboard, but last night I left my computer on in while it backed up the existing Samsung SATA SSD before I attempt a clone, and when I came back to it in the morning the disk shows as RAW in the disk utility and not at all in the WD dashboard. Attempting to format the disk returns a 'disk cannot be accessed' error. I attempted to boot from a windows bootable USB to use its formatting tool and/or do a fresh windows 10 install, but the formatting tool returns and error and an attempt to install windows return a 'windows cannot be installed to this disk the selected disk is of the gpt partition style' error. Then tried to clean the disk with diskpart in command prompt and that also returned an error, and now the disk does not show up in the windows install utility at all either.

Is this a faulty drive, or is something going wrong somewhere? The disk is listed as compatible for the motherboard on ASROCK's website, but the motherboard is not listed as compatible on WD's website. The fact that having the disk physically inserted makes the PC extremely slow makes this difficult to troubleshoot. If I remove the drive and boot up the pc in the original configuration it behaves as normal.
 
Solution
I see these on Asrocks compatibility list but they don't mention as of which bios level; have you tried updating the bios if you aren't on the latest already?

louis_A_man

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Jan 17, 2021
12
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4,510
I see these on Asrocks compatibility list but they don't mention as of which bios level; have you tried updating the bios if you aren't on the latest already?
sorry i forgot to reply to this - it did work thank you. I had considered motherboard firmware but had seen that none of the firmware patch notes mentioned anything about nvme ssd compatibility so thought it wouldn't make a difference