SSD not working with specific motherboard

[The Comfy Chair]

Hi,

I'm currently using a P8P67 Pro motherboard along with a plextor M5 pro SSD. It was working fine for about a week or so until the drive would not occasionally be detected at startup. Now the drive isn't being detected at all! This behaviour appears to only be occurring with my motherboard specifically (and by that i mean my *actual* motherboard, not the p8p67 pro line).

I've currently got 3 other HDDs and a DVD drive connected via SATA. The drive itself (The SSD) works perfectly fine in other computers, and other drives work perfectly well with the SATA cable/Power cable/SATA port. As far as i can tell, on the hardware front, it's all fine. Annoyingly (relatively) the motherboard is also perfectly fine, detecting other drives perfectly.

Here are the two things on the software side i've tried so far:

Flashing the BIOS of both the motherboard AND the SSD to their respective newest versions (the SSD was done via a different computer, since the SSD flashing software couldn't see the SSD on the desktop, of course).

Removing the CMOS battery on the motherboard to clear it.

I'm actually a bit lost with anything else i can do with the drive that wasn't proving it's not inherently broken, so does anyone have ideas of where else to go?

Thanks!

 

[XavierMace]

What port is it plugged into? I only ask because I had a P6T6 WS Revo that was a piece of shit when it came to the SATA ports. The SSD's only worked reliably plugged into ports 1 and 2. Otherwise it would randomly decide not to recognize one or both of them at startup. It also didn't cooperate at all with more than 4 drives hooked up.

 

[The Comfy Chair]

It's been plugged into all of them at some point.

Some further details from more testing, if this makes sense to anyone:

The SSD *normally* works on the second boot attempt (i.e. power on, bios -> hit the power button to turn it off and on again) if i set the SATA connections to IDE and disable the Marvel controller. This isn't exactly usable in a long term fashion, but it does work for getting the desktop into windows. It also only seems to work whilst in Sata 2 ports, not the sata 3 (previously it worked in sata 3 ports).

I've done a power cycle and like i've previously said, as *far as i know* the drive itself doesn't have any issues, but with the aforementioned apparently SATA 3 incompatibility, it does mean i can check the SATA 3 on another mobo, i may have been using a SATA 2 port.

EDIT:

Further update, the SSD is now working with the Marvell controller in ACHI again. I think, based on what i've read, that this is more down to the SATA standard not being 'standard' enough. So the best bet is to juggle different firmwares on the mobo and SSD to find the most stable combination.