Question Strange issue with SSD in Windows 11 ?

I'm not sure what is going on and I dont know what to do next. I cleaned my rig using canned air yesterday and later I noticed fps drops. I dug around and found my memory was at 100% running fortnite which it does not usually do. I tried a lot of different things including installing another DDR4 RAM kit (I had one on hand).

During one of the reboots Windows detected a drive error and said: fixing (e:) stage 3. I waited and it booted, but went through this process several times and took a long time. I was confused because my boot drive is not E, but I'm guessing I had a program on E that kicked in during startup (I'm sure I am wrong). E is a striped drive with 2 Samsung 850 500gb EVO's that I use as a game drive.

Out of frustration, I decided to do a clean install to windows 11 (I was gonna do it sooner or later anyway). So I install windows and both drives show up on my disk management, but when I tried to allocate space to one drive (Drive 0), windows gave me a warning saying to refresh disk mgmt because the drive could not be found.

So I downloaded Crystal Disk Mark and both 850 evo's showed up with 98% health.

This is when it get's strange. I decided to unplug both drives. I never assigned a letter to disk mgmt. When I booted up again, one of the EVO's was gone (cause it was disconnected, but Drive 0 was still there even though I unplugged the SATA cable.

Confused at this point I decided to run windows installer again. At this point both 850 EVOs SATA cables are unplugged. I boot the installer and when I pick the drives, it still list the phantom Drive 0 (500gb). I have two other drives installed. A SK Hynix P31 1tb and a Samsung 870 EVO 2tb.

In the bios for SATA port 0 it says the 850 EVO, even though it is completely unplugged from the PC.

Here is my rig:
Gigabyte z370 Aorus Gaming 7
8700K
EVGA 3080
SK Hynix P31 1tb
Samsung 870 2tb
Samsung 850 500gb
Samsung 850 500gb
 
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to have a look what the problem could be:
run userbenchmark.com and post the http link of your result, e.g. https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/28977730

reconnect the RAM kits
check temperatures of your rig and if the fans are still running
canned air can damage the motherboard´s fan controller or even the motherboard itself if not blocked
did you unplug sata data cables or power cables or both?

I think it's at the bios level. When I load into the bios, for SATA port 0 it list the 850 evo. The SATA and the power cables are pulled. The only way I can get Windows to ignore it is to turn off the port in the bios.

The memory was fine, I think it all had to do with the SSD. But it's odd the SSD checked okay and that I cannot remove it from the bios.

Honestly, I have 3tb of storage and I want to upgrade platform this year. I am just going to keep the port turned off and trash the disk. I dont need the extra space and SSD's are a lot cheaper now than when I bought that 850.
 
E is a striped drive with 2 Samsung 850 500gb EVO's that I use as a game drive.

I decided to unplug both drives. When I booted up again, one of the EVO's was gone (cause it was disconnected, but Drive 0 was still there even though I unplugged the SATA cable.
Please show screenshot from Disk Management.
(upload to imgur.com and post link)

Dynamic drives will appear as failed/missing in Disk Management even, if not connected.
You have to delete dynamic volumes. Then dynamic drive will disappear.
After reconnecting dynamic drive, convert it to basic.
 
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