NVMe drive disappears from the system on some cold boots....

[Kshipper]

I have seen NVMe SSD drives disappear from the system only to reappear on the next boot. I think it has specifically been the Western Digital Black SN750 and SN770. To be specific. This issue crops on cold boots where the system boots and tells you to insert bootable media. In all cases, these computers are usually newly built on B450 or B550 chipsets and various models of AMD Ryzen CPUs and various motherboard vendors (MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus).

If I shut the machine down a 2nd time, that always fixes it until the next time it does that. In all cases, this is the only drive in the machine so it is not the shared SATA port thing. Maybe I am missing some kind of critical BIOS setting or secret driver I am supposed to be loaded onto these machines? The problem is so prevalent that I tend to use Samsung's EVO SATA SSD for all builds where I want reliability over the raw speed of the NVMe drives. It is starting to get to the point where the SATA SSD feels slow now with all these super fast PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe drives around.

I just rebuilt a young man's Dell gaming desktop with a WD Black SN770 NVMe SSD and it didn't boot when he came to pick it up (here I am showing him how much faster it is and then 'insert boot drive' ...embarrassing!). All I could do is tell him: I have seen this before and it doesn't happen often, but it happens and I don't know the reason. How could I have rebuilt his machine with this drive and rebooted it a zillion times only to have it refuse to boot when the customer comes to get it? Gahh.

If you know of the fix or you have seen this too, please chime in. =)

 

[neeyik]

I recall seeing various posts around the web about WD_Black M.2 drives having compatibility issues with B450/550 chipsets, but they seemed to be eventually resolved through BIOS updates. I should well imagine that you've checked that you're using the latest ones in each case, though. If you're only experiencing these problems with the WD drives, I'd personally recommend changing to another brand -- Samsung's 970 EVOs are nice and cheap, and generally seem to work in anything (don't bother with the 980 EVO, though).

It's great that Ryzen CPUs are essentially full-on SoCs, but sometimes all it takes is a tiny change in the Agesa microcode to bork everything or keep it all happy. And while motherboard vendors are reliant on AMD releasing such updates in a timely manner, they can be pretty slow at adopting the changes too. For example, MSI updated the BIOS for its B450 Tomahawk for the latest Agesa (1.2.0.7) on August 15th of this year, whereas Gigabyte did the same for its B450 Gaming X on July 26th and Asus on the 25th for the B450-F Gaming. Not a huge difference in dates but somewhat frustrating nonetheless.

 

[Kshipper]

Oh yes, the latest BIOS and load defaults and even firmware on the drives themselves do not chase this little problem away.

I remember those Agesa updates that addressed a stutter where the screen would freeze when gaming. I also recall the Samsung 980 being made with some lower-cost components during the height of the pandemic lockdown that affected their performance. Maybe that is why I avoided the 970.

 

[Volanar]

@Kshipper, did you find a resolution to this? I've been following a few threads and it seems to be a dead end so far besides switching to another drive brand.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/bapccanada/comments/ku7tkp

 

[Kshipper]

The WD Blacks disappearing as a boot option has been back to working fine for me again <boggle>. One thing I did at the height of the 'WD black disappearing from boot problem' was I started building rigs with the Samsung Evo SATA SSD, which never failed to boot for me. However, Samsung drives have been going bad on me now, which is worse than not booting. I lost a 2TB & a 1TB SATA SSD and now a 2TB 980 Pro today (the Pro was bad out of the box, even though it has 5x firmware, which is supposed to be the good one). I have seen several bad Adata SATA SSD and several bad Kingstons. It's as if the pandemic chip shortage has shown us how companies have skimped on quality. I am still relying on the WD Black SN770.