M.2 970 EVO disabling all but two SATA ports on GA-Z97X-UD5H board

[jhnosko]

Hello all.
I've been looking around the forums and the rest of the internet and can't seem to find an answer as to why, after installing my new Samsung 970 EVO 500GB SSD in my GA-Z97X-UD5H board it disables all but the gSATA ports on my motherboard.

In looking at the manual, it says that it will disable ports 4 and 5 when an M.2 drive is in use. All of my drives work as I have swapped each of them out in the working ports so there are no dead drives in my system or power issues. In order to get the NVME to be bootable, I had to update my BIOS to the most recent BIOS Gigabyte has listed on the support/downloads section for my board on their website. For some reason, the two SATA 3 ports (0 and 1), SATA Express ports (2, 3, 4 and 5) do not load or recognize drives as being connected. The only ports that are actually loading drives are gSATA ports (7 and 8). Keep in mind this is right after a fresh OS install. I downloaded and installed all motherboard and chipset drivers from Gigabyte.

I'm wondering if there is a setting in the BIOS that I need to change in order for these ports to become active again (all of them are set to ENABLED in BIOS though and I loaded optimized defaults after updating my BIOS)? Or am I just out of luck with using an NVME this new in a board that old? I've looked to see if Intel had any updates for the processor and the only downloads I can find are for the Intel HD graphics or the utility app downloads.

I've seen a few other posts where people didn't realize that an M.2 drive in a SATA configuration disables two ports but this is a bit ridiculous with essentially cutting off 5 SATA ports in favor of using an NVME.

PC Build list

Intel i7 4770K
Gigabyte GA-Z97-UD5H motherboard
Samsung 970 EVO (500GB)
Corsair RM1000 PSU
Gigabyte 980Ti Windforce
Corsair Vengeance RAM 32 GB (can't recall specifics in the RAM at the moment)
Other drives are various SATA SSD and HDD

 

[DRagor]

By any chance in SATA Configuration> SATA Mode Selection you don't have RAID instead of AHCI? That is the only BIOS setting that comes to mind that could cause trouble here. Otherwise, as you wrote, only ports 4/5 should be disabled.

 

[jhnosko]

By any chance in SATA Configuration> SATA Mode Selection you don't have RAID instead of AHCI? That is the only BIOS setting that comes to mind that could cause trouble here. Otherwise, as you wrote, only ports 4/5 should be disabled.

I'm at work now but I'm fairly certain when I last looked at the BIOS it said AHCI and I think that is the default setting when load optimized is selected but I will check that for sure when I get home, thanks! Another PC building enthusiast where I work (who knows more than I do) seems to think that it might be caused by the new model of the NVME needing more bandwidth than an NVME that came out when my board was initially released. My current plan is to try an PCIe SATA expansion card to see if I can get my other drives to load. Never used one but they are cheap enough to try out.

 

[DRagor]

That is not the case. Even if the drive would need more HSIO lanes, it just could not get them unless the board has right switches - and your boards manual shows there are none except for SATA4/5 ports. Disabling all ports coming from chipset (7/8 are linked to Marvell chip) is definitely unexpected behavior.

 

[4745454b]

The ports work fine if the SSD isn't in the system? That's what I would check first. It's possible you just need to load chipset drivers? You said ports 7 & 8 are the only ones that work and the ports numbered that high are usually tied for a 3rd party chip. Sounds like all the SATA ports on the chipset aren't working.

Be careful using a PCIe board SSD. Your system might be too old and not support booting from PCIe. It will work fine as a data drive, but not an OS drive.

 

[jhnosko]

The ports work fine if the SSD isn't in the system? That's what I would check first. It's possible you just need to load chipset drivers? You said ports 7 & 8 are the only ones that work and the ports numbered that high are usually tied for a 3rd party chip. Sounds like all the SATA ports on the chipset aren't working.

Be careful using a PCIe board SSD. Your system might be too old and not support booting from PCIe. It will work fine as a data drive, but not an OS drive.

Before the system had the M.2 in it, all of the drives worked just fine but this was from when I initially setup the system. I will double check that I grabbed and installed the right chipset drivers just to be sure but I was fairly confident that the ones I grabbed were the most recent. Would it be possible I need to grab an older chipset driver? I had grabbed the Intel Management Engine Interface and the Intel INF Installation since both of them listed Windows 10 64 bit.

Wait hold up, I'm typing this as I look at the Gigabyte page, I looked at the SATA portion and originally when I was downloading and installing drivers I had seen the SATA portion and thought that those only pertained to RAID setup drivers but it also lists AHCI... I'm guessing I need the Intel SATA Preinstall Drivers and possibly the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Drivers for Windows 10 64-bit. I will check this out when I get home and leave an update with the results. I apologize, it was like 1 in the morning when I was trying to mess with this and I guess I overlooked that bit.

 

[DRagor]

No need to apologize, we are here to help and even if it was you who did the mess, that's still ok

 

[4745454b]

I hope it's just a driver issue. If that's all it is, great. I'd rather it be something simple than something horrible.

If the drivers look good, the next step I'd take is see if the ports work with the drive removed. Pull it, test the ports. (I'd also look in the bios. Make sure they are turned on.)