Discussion Disabling M.2 NVMe drives in BIOS - motherboard support

[MM2]

Disabling specific M.2 (NVMe or SATA) drives can be useful sometimes (testing, dual booting, privacy, security, overclocking...).
Unfortunately, while motherboards often let you disable SATA ports, support for disabling M.2 slots is almost non-existant.

So, I have contacted motherboard manufacturers regarding this feature and I want to share my findings. I hope to get some feedback from users willing to post their own experiences too.

ASUS informed me that their Z690 line has some limited support for this: it lets you enable/disable one M.2 slot. Looking at the manual, it's the one from the chipset. I don't know if this works on Z790 too or on the new AMD mobos, because there are no BIOS manuals available for them.

ASRock doesn't have this as a standard feature, but they told me I can contact them and they'll send me a custom BIOS for my mobo with this feature enabled. And it would work even on older models, like AMD B450 and Intel Z490. They didn't say anything about it being limited to specific M.2 slots (like in the Asus case), but they did say it wouldn't work on PCIe slots with PCIe-M.2 adapters.

Gigabyte just gave me a standard answer that they'll consider it. MSI and Biostar didn't reply so far (I might retry through a different channel).

So, if anyone has an ASRock mobo and is interested in this feature, please contact them and let us know how it goes. So far this looks like the most promising road and I gotta say the ASRock contact person was quite nice. Those with newer ASUS boards can also try it for that one slot.
And it would also help if more people request this feature from motherboard manufacturers. I think it should be standard and it's more needed for M.2 than for SATA drives.

 

[Grobe]

I get that would be a nice feature, but I also get that the enable/disable M.2 slots not being implemented may just be by design (or probably require extra on-chip feature to be made that also cost money).

The idea (assumed I'm correct) is most people install the OS on a M.2 device, so no need to disable. You most often want to disable a storage device prior to install an OS to avoid the potential risk of the boot sector being put on the wrong drive. In most cases this will probably be the larger capacity, but slower hard drive used as plain file storage.

 

[MM2]

the enable/disable M.2 slots not being implemented may just be by design (or probably require extra on-chip feature to be made that also cost money).

Yeah, I thought that maybe it needs some hardware switches on the mobo. But since ASRock told me that it can be done with a custom BIOS on a wide range of motherboards, it might be just a simple firmware tweak.

As for the general usefulness of disabling M.2 drives... I kinda agree with you that most people don't need this right now, but that's also true for many other features you can find on a motherboard. If you google this you'll see that there are people asking for it. And I think with NVMe drives becoming more and more popular, this demand will only increase.

 

[MM2]

The ASRock rep confirmed that the custom BIOS works on all M.2 slots, even those from the CPU.

---

Meanwhile, I found this option in the ASUS Intel 700 series manual, in the same section (PCH Storage Configuration) as in the Z690 manual, but with a difference:

I hope that's just an error and that the toggle isn't only limited to SATA M.2 drives.

 

[MM2]

An update, after looking at the motherboards from all manufacturers.

Biostar support told me they don't support this in their mobos.
MSI support was a pain with their broken English... in the end, it doesn't look like they support it either.

EVGA appears to support it on all M.2 slots, according to the manuals that I found.
For example, the X570 manual:

The Z790 manual:

So, right now, EVGA mobos seem to be the best choice for this specific feature.