Aorus x299 ultra gaming - HDD/Nvme detect

[Stealtharsenal]

Hey guys,

I've got a bit of a question when it comes to PCI lanes and storage drives. We are talking about an x299 system with a 7820x and an Aorus x299 ultra gaming. I noticed that a couple of my drives are not being detected and I wonder if it's because lanes are not available.

So right now, I have my main boot drive as a Samsung 970 EVO NVME. I have three additional SSDs (all three are Samsung SSD), a 2TB WD Black drive and a samsung 950 pro that are being detected. With that said, I have another WD 1TB black in the system and a Samsung 970 Evo Plus drive that are not being detected by disk management. I know the drives work so that's not a problem. I moved some SATA cables around and nothing. This has led me to believe that I just don't have the PCI lanes available for these drives. Am I correct with this assumption or do I need to enable something?

The nvme slot on the board that is troublesome is M2Q-32G which is the last slot, bottom right. I taken a look in the manual, and I must be missing something as I am not explicitly seeing what the issue is. I did try pulling a sound card and disconnect another SSD to see if that did anything, but didn't seem to. Now I know for a fact the nvme drive works as I just had a fresh Win 10 install on it earlier today for testing purposes.

Any thoughts or is it as simple as out of lanes with the plethora of drives, sound card and my graphics card.

Thanks.

 

[UsandThem]

Many times using M.2 slots will disable some of your SATA ports. Each board is different (depending how the manufacturer implements the PCIe lanes).

 

[UsandThem]

The spec page at Gigabyte didn't reveal anything, so I had to download the manual. Page 32 has the details of the M.2 slots and what populating them does to various SATA ports:

 

[Stealtharsenal]

@UsandThem

Thanks, I missed that page completely in my manual. So it would appear that is disabling my WB 1TB drive. I suppose my question that remains is this. I have M2Q-32G populated with an NVME drive. I am not detecting it at all. I can see my other two NVME drives and my 3 SATA SSD's. Is that M.2 disabled then from lack of lanes? I know the 7820x only has 28 and not the 44.

Thanks

 

[UsandThem]

It might have to do with the lanes. I assume you have a GPU installed in your PCIEX16 slot1.

I looked through the manual at the various footnotes, and I don't see anything listed that would disable that particular M.2 slot, so I would have to assume you are out of available lanes. You can verify this is the issue by removing another M.2 drive. If your 3rd appears for use after that, it would be you are out of lanes.

 

[Stealtharsenal]

@UsandThem

Thank you.

You are correct, I have my graphics card in slot 1. I'll pull an nvme drive and see what happens. I didn't think to pull one because I pull some Sata ssd's off, but that wouldn't necessarily help pcie lanes.

I can give this a shot tonight when I swap my new graphics card in.

Thanks

 

[Stealtharsenal]

@UsandThem

Pulling that nvme drive from M2Q-32G brought my WB 1TB black drive back to being detected. So when I populate that slot, it kills the SATA ports it is in. I just don't know at this point if it is a motherboard design or a lane issue.

 

[UsandThem]

You might want to send a message off to Gigabyte tech support. Hopefully they will respond back and let you know for sure.

They don't have the best reputation with support from all the various threads I've read, but maybe they will respond back.

Outside of that, maybe someone here might have experience with that board and CPU combination.

 

[ehume]

@UsandThem

Pulling that nvme drive from M2Q-32G brought my WB 1TB black drive back to being detected. So when I populate that slot, it kills the SATA ports it is in. I just don't know at this point if it is a motherboard design or a lane issue.

Try the manual that came with the MB. Or go online and find the manual. You will find it in PDF form. Do a word search.

 

[UsandThem]

Try the manual that came with the MB. Or go online and find the manual. You will find it in PDF form. Do a word search.

We've already covered that aspect earlier in the thread.

 

[Stealtharsenal]

@ehume

Yes, we pulled down the manual for it. When that slot is populated, it is killing sata 3 to 7. This is further confirmed when I remove the NVME drive and the WD black detects.

I will reach out to Gigabyte and try to get an answer, but @UsandThem is correct, Gigabyte support if horrid. I thought maybe if I went to a community forum someone might be able to say yey or ney as to what the issue is here. Maybe they had an Aorus X299 board and had similar issues. If it is the board, it should still be in warranty. If its a lanes issue, I will deal with this.

 

[UsandThem]

I think when there was a bunch of BIOS update issues with Gigabyte during the Z170 days, I came across most of my info on the TweakTown forums.

They seem to have a lot more users who use Gigabyte over there: https://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/

Maybe you can come across someone with a similar setup over there.

 

[ehume]

@ehume

Yes, we pulled down the manual for it. When that slot is populated, it is killing sata 3 to 7. This is further confirmed when I remove the NVME drive and the WD black detects.

I will reach out to Gigabyte and try to get an answer, but @UsandThem is correct, Gigabyte support if horrid. I thought maybe if I went to a community forum someone might be able to say yey or ney as to what the issue is here. Maybe they had an Aorus X299 board and had similar issues. If it is the board, it should still be in warranty. If its a lanes issue, I will deal with this.

I used Gigabyte boards. I had reason to contact tech support at times. It was convoluted but reflective of the fact that the guy helping me was half a world away -- different time zones and such. My questions were fully answered.

But that was years ago. No telling for now.

I concur with the info about TweakTown forums.