WD Black m.2 SSD not appearing on older system (Z68)

[zerodb]

Well, now it's a freshly gen'd system, because as soon as I attempted to switch my BIOS to AHCI I got stuck in a Win10 boot loop so I just figured I'd start a fresh install.

In any case, I picked up this WD ssd (m key, nvme, pcie 3.0 x4) and a silverstone PCI-E adapter. I know with my older system (Asrock Z68, i5-2500k) I won't be able to boot from this but I do plan to upgrade my core system soon so I figured i'd invest in some storage I'd be able to reuse, and just have it be an applications storage drive for now.

But it's just NOT there. I've reseated the SSD in the adapter, I've reseated the adapter in the slot, I've tried two different slots on the board. It doesn't show up in BIOS which is no surprise, but it also doesn't show up at ALL in my device manager. It's like it doesn't even exist.

Do I have a dead component or am I missing some critical step here? My Asrock MB is on newest firmware (which I'll admit isn't very new) and as I said, it's a fresh Win10 install with all updates complete.

Thanks for any suggestions on this.

 

[Ralston18]

Take a look at the following link:

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=17144

May provide some additional insight about what may be happening. Or not happening as the case may be.

There are also some WD folks who participate in this Forum. One of them may comment as well.

 

[zerodb]

Take a look at the following link:

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=17144

May provide some additional insight about what may be happening. Or not happening as the case may be.

There are also some WD folks who participate in this Forum. One of them may comment as well.

Thanks; I know my MB doesn't natively support it, obviously, but I do have PCI-E 3.0 slots and a correct adapter card and I've seen others post that they're successfully using NVME ssds on this motherboard, so I'm just trying to figure out what could be missing here. I don't think it's an issue of WD vs. Samsung or any other type of device... it should all be pretty standard. Even with no recognition in bios I was pretty confident it would show up in Windows.

 

[Ralston18]

Well certainly worth the try and not harm in confidence per se.

I suggest focusing on proving via other MB's etc. that each component is truly working as expected.

May or may not be a viable "test path" for you to follow but some confirmation of functionality is needed.

Either one thing or another is not working as expected. Or it is indeed some missing factor.

What versions are involved? Could it be firmware related?

Check the MB forums and see if you can get more information from those posters who got it to work.

May be some fine detail or difference in play....

 

[zerodb]

Either one thing or another is not working as expected. Or it is indeed some missing factor.

I think it's one thing AND another!

Updating for the sake of anyone who lands here trying to sort out their own problems.

I finally found the HWinfo64 utility and it showed the PCIe slot as unoccupied. So I moved to another slot, and in that slot in certain VERY particular orientations I could get it to recognize that something was there, but I had to wiggle it around to get that to happen.

Once it showed that something was in the port, I could see the NVME controller show up under Storage Controllers in the device manager. When that was consistent, I could finally see the drive properly identified in the Disk Management utility. Yay!

Until I tried to initialize it. Tried to initialize as GUID and it says something to the effect of "this disk is too small for GPT" so I try MBR, and it says "invalid operation"

Tried Diskpart from the command line and it does the same thing.

My guess is the adapter card is making a bad connection with the PCI bus or the SSD or BOTH, and there's probably even a chance that something got fried on the SSD. Ordering alternate parts for both pieces and will try to figure out if a piece is defective.