[SOLVED] Trouble installing a M.2 drive

[gareth35]

Recently purchased a 2tb M.2 drive to ideally use as a faster drive booting games, already had a SSD boot drive and mechanical drive. My motherboard is a gigabyte z97x gaming 3, already noted that it doesn't support sata express with the m.2 drive filled. Have tried installing the m.2 drive and moving what i presume were the connection for the ssd (they were next to the sata express words on the mb) to the next 2 ports down.
On boot, and in the bios, cannot see the m.2 drive, do they usually need drivers or just plug and go?

Motherboard gigabyte z97x gaming 3
M.2 PNY CS3030 2tb SSD
Boot drive Samsung 850 evo SSD 250 gb
Mechanical drive WD Black 2 tb

 

[Barty1884]

Should be plug & play but, in my experience with Z97 (albeit with 2x ASUS boards, not Gigabyte) and onboard M.2, they don't actually show up in the BIOS until they have an OS installed to them.

If you boot from install media, the M.2 should be present to install Windows to.

Boot back into your 850EVO and inside Windows, check Disk Management. The M.2 should show up there.

If you're just looking to use it as bulk storage, then there's nothing to worry about, provided it shows in Disk Management.

 

[gareth35]

Should be plug & play but, in my experience with Z97 (albeit with 2x ASUS boards, not Gigabyte) and onboard M.2, they don't actually show up in the BIOS until they have an OS installed to them.

If you boot from install media, the M.2 should be present to install Windows to.

Boot back into your 850EVO and inside Windows, check Disk Management. The M.2 should show up there.

If you're just looking to use it as bulk storage, then there's nothing to worry about, provided it shows in Disk Management.

Just an update to say this worked perfectly, so thank you very much.

Small addition to anyone that might look at this in the future, had to actually let the windows installer start the instalation to the M.2 and then cancel, not just let it recognise the drive as being available to install to at the start and then cancel like I did the first time.

 

[DavidCr]

I have just bought a Seagate model 33000650NS 2.3 TB HDD for use as a backup. My Gigabyte mobo BIOS sees it as a 3TB with 16 heads (it has only 10 heads) but XP Pro SP3 only sees 746.5 GB. HELP? There must be a solution to this

 

[USAFRet]

I have just bought a Seagate model 33000650NS 2.3 TB HDD for use as a backup. My Gigabyte mobo BIOS sees it as a 3TB with 16 heads (it has only 10 heads) but XP Pro SP3 only sees 746.5 GB. HELP? There must be a solution to this

Please start a new thread for your particular situation.
Yours is significantly different than the OP.