Question Do 2TB NVMe drives normally show as two drives ?

Alan Alan

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In win 11, the drive manager thought a 2 tb was a 1 tb. So I went into the bios and verified the drive ID as 2 tb. I changed a crucial 1 tb with a crucial 2 tb and I think windows still thought the 1 tb was still there before I went in the bios. However after exiting the bios the drive manage now showed two 1tb sections on one drive. I already formatted one section and the second one that popped up acted like a separate volume, I formatted it and ended up with two 1tb drives like I partitioned a single drive. Curious if I deleted both drives if disk mgr. would show a single 2tb drive. The Crucial part is a Crucial P3 Plus 2TB PCIe 4.0 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT2000P3PSSD8 These things drive me nuts, what a coo coo.
 
In win 11, the drive manager thought a 2 tb was a 1 tb. So I went into the bios and verified the drive ID as 2 tb. I changed a crucial 1 tb with a crucial 2 tb and I think windows still thought the 1 tb was still there before I went in the bios. However after exiting the bios the drive manage now showed two 1tb sections on one drive. I already formatted one section and the second one that popped up acted like a separate volume, I formatted it and ended up with two 1tb drives like I partitioned a single drive. Curious if I deleted both drives if disk mgr. would show a single 2tb drive. The Crucial part is a Crucial P3 Plus 2TB PCIe 4.0 3D NAND NVMe M.2 SSD, up to 5000MB/s - CT2000P3PSSD8 These things drive me nuts, what a coo coo.
It sounds like this was a return, yes delet both partitions and it should see 2tb unlabeled re initiate the drives and should partition to 2tbs again
 

Alan Alan

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It sounds like this was a return, yes delet both partitions and it should see 2tb unlabeled re initiate the drives and should partition to 2tbs again
Ya, it's a return deal, I tried 4 nvme in the Asus hyper x 16 but it only recognized two or them. So I returned them and swapped with a pair of 2tb's. Thanks, I quit while I was ahead and striped them down to 2 dynamic raid 0 drives. It's what I wanted in the first place. Originally I was hoping the stipe the four nvme's with intels Vrock but nothing cooperated. At least it works, it should be fast enough for home use. I think Vrock is for enterprise servers or something. Thanks for ensuring me it will show one drive. I really didn't know.
 
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Alan Alan

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either something fishy going on with how you have formatted and prepared the drive,

something fishy with Crucial's design of the drive,

or this drive has previously been used and setup with two 1TB partitions before it even got to you.
Na, I bought 2 of them and they were new. Even disc manage showed the old part number from the last drive I had in there. Funny though, I was pissed and thought they sent me the wrong drives, Luckily the correct part number showed up in the bios so I didn't have to pull the card and open it up to check. I guess rule of thumb is to remove the drives, enter and exit bios. Shut down and reinstall the card. Maybe visit drive mgr. before shut down too. That might clear any memory of pre existing cards.
 

Alan Alan

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what are you hoping to achieve by setting up 2x 2TB NVMe in a RAID configuration?

is this some major server for corporate use
or just a home setup with multiple systems networked?
It's not a server but I use it to pull individual samples of piano's. Each key is sampled with many layers, each sample is a different key velocity. So when I play, it constantly plays the samples direct from disc. There can be 500 samples playing at one time when I hold the sustain pedal down and run some arpeggios or something. So ya, it's pretty much like a major server in that aspect. There are probably thousands of sample when other instruments join in. Total insanity, random access like that is not possible on hard drives but almost works on sata ssd's, but for nvme it's not a problem. Didn't want to use dynamic disks but I can't get intels Vroc to work. Asus discovered it didn't work after I bought the mobo, then I discovered it didn't work and did some research only to find an article by Asus saying it didn't work about a year after I bought it. lol same problem different day.
 
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Alan Alan

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you would possibly get much better read/write speeds using individual drives in this scenario.

RAID access and processing for space could actually reduce the amount of time it takes to (re)locate bits of information.
Possible, I know little, but it is Raid 0. I know raid 0 is faster on standard hard drives. I think the striping fetches the info from two drives, but with ssd's I have no clue what goes on. It could be that raid 0 is threaded by two cores, who knows. But it's not worth testing unless it seems slow, ssd's wear, you test, you wear. So far they are working good, but I haven't used em where it matters either.
 
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Alan Alan

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by "card", do you mean the M.2 drive(s) themselves or that you are using a PCIe card to control/access these drives?
Yeh, it's an asus nvme card that connects up to 4 nvme drives if your mobo has enough lanes. I could only get 2 to work but have another card that hold 1 nvme ssd in the too and it works. So I have three nvme ssd's. I'm still baffled on why the card would not run 3 nvme m.2 cards with the single nvme removed. Seems to me, pulling one, frees up the lanes for the asus X 16 nvme card. BTW , the heatsink covers the m.2 cards, That's what I was trying to say about the bios reading what was actually in there. If it didn't i'd have to pull the card and take the top off. Crucial is a good company but these are made in mexico and I thought someone put the 1tb's in a 2 tb's box. But no, they were correct. Weird stuff, computers always do screwy stuff like this. It never fails.
 
Yeh, it's an asus nvme card that connects up to 4 nvme drives if your mobo has enough lanes. I could only get 2 to work but have another card that hold 1 nvme ssd in the too and it works. So I have three nvme ssd's. I'm still baffled on why the card would not run 3 nvme m.2 cards with the single nvme removed. Seems to me, pulling one, frees up the lanes for the asus X 16 nvme card. BTW , the heatsink covers the m.2 cards, That's what I was trying to say about the bios reading what was actually in there. If it didn't i'd have to pull the card and take the top off. Crucial is a good company but these are made in mexico and I thought someone put the 1tb's in a 2 tb's box. But no, they were correct. Weird stuff, computers always do screwy stuff like this. It never fails.
Folks go and build complex setups and then go crazy trying to figure out why things are not working well.

Run the machine in KISS mode you won't spend all your time fighting with odd stuff.
 
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Karadjgne

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What's the difference, I know nothing.
You can't boot from NVMe in Legacy mode, so GPT is the only way to go (because MBR isn't supported in EFI booting). With AHCI drive, you can go either way (gpt/mbr).NVMe is based on RAID drivers, not AHCI.

MBR has been around for 40 odd years, it's truly Ancient way of doing things. NVMe does not like CSM, which is legacy bios, it much prefers UEFI boot process.
TPM2 (used in Win11) requires CSM disabled in order to enable SecureBoot.

CSM is a compatibility mode. It's a legacy bios, but will accept UEFI equipment.

It's possible to run into issues with equipment like gpus that are UEFI vbios, most currently will accept legacy, but there's no guarantee that later editions with pcie5 requirements or TPM2 requirements will.

With MBR, all partition and drive info is kept in 1 place, if it gets bricked, the entire drive is bricked. With GPT, each partition has its own boot record at the beginning of each partition, so if 1 boot record gets bricked, only that partition is affected, not the whole drive.
 
With MBR, all partition and drive info is kept in 1 place, if it gets bricked, the entire drive is bricked. With GPT, each partition has its own boot record at the beginning of each partition, so if 1 boot record gets bricked, only that partition is affected, not the whole drive.
Not true. Sector 0 of an MBR system has the master boot code plus a partition table with up to 4 partitions. The first sector of each partition has a boot sector for that partition, just as it does in GPT systems. There is a copy of the boot sector elsewhere in the partition, either at the end for NTFS, or typically at logical sector 6 for FAT.

If you delete the partition table in sector 0, it is a relatively simple matter to regenerate it (requires a couple of clicks in DMDE). The reason is that each boot sector contains information that is duplicated in sector 0.

This is an excellent resource for partition tables and boot sectors:

https://thestarman.pcministry.com/index.html
 

Alan Alan

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Folks go and build complex setups and then go crazy trying to figure out why things are not working well.

Run the machine in KISS mode you won't spend all your time fighting with odd stuff.
Yah, it never fails, things never go as planned, sometimes ya gotta keep pushing until it works. My friend bought an external sound card in the mid 90's and we never got it working. Everyone blamed the problem on everyone else. I told em to get a Mac because they can't blame themselves. Aggravating crap as usual, it's done, it works and now it's time for a glass of wine. good lord....
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
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either something fishy going on with how you have formatted and prepared the drive,

something fishy with Crucial's design of the drive,

or this drive has previously been used and setup with two 1TB partitions before it even got to you.
there is one other possibility. I have seen controller chips that split drives into 2, but that is more of a buggy controller chip, not by design.
 
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Alan Alan

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there is one other possibility. I have seen controller chips that split drives into 2, but that is more of a buggy controller chip, not by design.
Thanks Colif, all is good, I only wanted 2 drives so I striped the separate M.2 drives and still ended up with 2 drives. Used raid 0 and dynamic discs. Could be faster than two individual drives depending on how the data is handled. In a way it might be for the simple reason of eliminating latency if two threads are running and one is deliver the data while the other is accessing the data. Really not sure how it works. So far so good, except today during boot I got the same old problem windows has been plagued with. Something about building security option. I had to reset the computer and it was then fine. I think it has something to do with the kernal not finishing a subroutine or something while windows tries to write something on the drives to speed up the next boot. I know there's a way to turn off fast boot and I may just do that if it continues.
 

Alan Alan

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Those Asus Hyper x 16 nvme cards can be a pain.

Hope it works out for you :)
Ya, it's not really the Asus Hyper x 16 card alone, it has to do with the lanes on the mobo and the processor. But I kept trying different things and managed to get it going. All in all, it was worth it. My old hard drives were the WD raptors. They lasted nearly 12 years and had to be on their last leg.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
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12 years for a drive that runs at 10k rpm is good going. I had 2 of them though not at same time.
first died in about 3 years, and I replaced it with second one. The second one was still working earlier this year but PC it was in died. It had started to lose space 6 years ago.

The asus cards generally need Threadripper to work. I didn't ask what you had.
 

Alan Alan

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12 years for a drive that runs at 10k rpm is good going. I had 2 of them though not at same time.
first died in about 3 years, and I replaced it with second one. The second one was still working earlier this year but PC it was in died. It had started to lose space 6 years ago.

The asus cards generally need Threadripper to work. I didn't ask what you had.
Yeh, it mentioned thread ripper for amd but it also mentioned Vroc for intel. Both are for raid control. I have the intel coffee lake . The Asus has heatsinking pads for the nvme's. Pretty much why I like it. The m,2 can bet hot, probably when writing. I have another problem now thought. I retuned 3 of the crucial m.2 and kept one. Put it in a usb card that uses nvme drives. The m.2 still had a memory of two other usb drives and it showed up offline in drive manage. The instructions said that might happen, if so just switch it online. So I did that and formatted the drive and wrote to it. Then after it was in there not being used it suddenly stopped working and I got a fatal error. Rebooted and still fatal error, Took it out and plugged into another computer, and it worked. So I put it back in the original computer and it worked but it somehow ended up as a read only drive. I look at it's properties and it says it wasn't migrated. Looking deeper, it showed the other usb drives I have embedded in there. At this point I don't know what to think, any ideas on tuning off read only. I tried under tools and authenticated users etc. In there the permission for write and read are both turned on. I guess I'll call crucial, they should no all about this. It's crucial's nvme and I read it's a common problem.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
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i replied to that in other thread, but Crucial and Adata are 2 brands I see fail a lot when it comes to nvme. Since it still works on win 10 I would be tempted to save any info off it and return it as well. You better off with Samsung drives, I rarely see those fail. Might cost more but seem to last longer too.