Error with m.2 installation

[Terrik]

I wanted to expand my HD so I picked up an SN850 m.2 drive. I have a Strix Gaming e-570, and by everything I can see, I have enough PCI 4.0 slots, including 2 m.2 drive slots. Currently im running an M.2 and an SSD already. However, when I try install the SN580 in my 2nd slot, I get to the splash screen of bios and get no further, including not being able to get into bios. Once I remove the SN 580 from the slot, everything works normally. So I dont know if this means my new drive doesn't work, or something else is going on. Suggestions welcome.

Error code for the ASUS mobo is 0d.

 

[Ravenpoe]

What if you disconnect all other hard drives and try it with just the new one?

Post automatically merged: Mar 7, 2022

What if you disconnect all other hard drives and try it with just the new one?

 

[Terrik]

What if you disconnect all other hard drives and try it with just the new one?

Post automatically merged: Mar 7, 2022

What if you disconnect all other hard drives and try it with just the new one?

Let's find out

 

[Terrik]

I think it's the drive. Connecting just that drive gives the same result. If I put my original drive in slot 2 by itself, it works.

 

[Ravenpoe]

I think it's the drive. Connecting just that drive gives the same result. If I put my original drive in slot 2 by itself, it works.

Yup, sounds like there's something up with the drive

 

[PatrThom]

Probably the drive, but also possibly a conflict with your second slot and something else. I haven't checked your manual, but sometimes that second M.2 slot either 1) shares PCIe lanes with another drive/slot and so you can only use them either/or, or else 2) slot #2 only supports SATA drives.
Also at first you say you have SN850 but then you say SN580 and this is confusing because I did the exact same thing when I bought my SN850. Plenty of people online have made the same error, too, which makes searching for info about this drive difficult (SN850=real, SN550=real, SN580=doesn't exist (yet?)).

Ok, so I checked the manual, and it says that slot M.2_2 shares lanes with slot PCIEx16_3 (the bottom-most one) and they will jockey back and forth about how much bandwidth each one gets depending on what other cards are installed. The manual also explicitly states that M.2_2 does support both SATA and NVMe SSDs. Also the manual does not give any useful info about error code 0D other than to say it is "reserved for future error states," though another site suggests it may indicate something drive-related (they had an issue which was resolved by monkeying around with drives). So if you already tried your new drive up in slot M.2_1 and it still did not work there? Yeah, probably an issue with the new drive itself.

Some other advice about your board, since it follows the same kind of slot layout as most other boards out there. The only slots connected directly to the CPU with the faster PCIe 4.0 link are your top two PCIe x16 slots and M.2_1. Everything else on the board (All your USB, Ethernet, SATA ports, sound chip, the PCIe x1 and bottom-most PCIe x16 slot, M.2_2, and so on) has to funnel through one PCIe v4.0 x4 link between the CPU and the X570 chipset:

This means that if you ever put a high enough load on your second SSD (once you get a working one, that is), there is the chance that traffic to the drive will saturate all the bandwidth that link can handle, which may cause your Ethernet/sound/etc. to stutter. So if you want to always have full speed from your (new) drive without it competing with all the other stuff on your board, it would be better to mount it on a carrier card and install the card into the second PCIe x16 slot. Yes, this would mean a slight FPS drop, but it would take the load off that above chipset link meaning there's less chance your network would drop out.

Mind you, the above is all because your 2nd drive (the SN850) is a PCIe v4.0 drive. If you install a different drive that is PCIe v3.0, you wouldn't have this issue, because PCIe v3 is "only" capable of 3GB/sec and so won't ever overload that 7GB/sec chipset link.

--Patrick

 

[Terrik]

Wow Pat, thats a lot of good info. Honestly seems it might be a good idea to send back the SN580, get a 2tb 970 pro, save 50 bucks, and worry about 4.0 pci-e when I build a new system In a year or two.

 

[Tinwhistler]

@PatrThom always impresses me in the tech forums. He's as plugged in today into modern computer equipment as I was...like 15 years ago

 

[Bubble181]

I don't think I ever was as much up to speed as he is, even when I was actively building a computer

 

[PatrThom]

worry about 4.0 pci-e when I build a new system

I don't know what you plan to do with your second hard drive, how fast it needs to be, how many transactions per second it needs to support, but if it's just going to be a place to store stuff, you can always just get a plain old SATA SSD for storage if you don't want to go HDD.

This is all stuff I pick up while trying to stay on top of what I may or may not want to look for in MY (or a family member's) next system, because I want to discover the pros and cons of all the different options before I plunk down any of my (or their) money to do so.

15 years ago.

15 years ago, I had just started work at my first official tech job as a 6mo contract employee. But I had already been dabbling with tech hardware on my own for at least another 14 years prior.

--Patrick

 

[Tinwhistler]

I don't think I ever was as much up to speed as he is, even when I was actively building a computer

Oh, back in the day, I was a whiz. I built all of my old machines, and easily cleared $1000/month profit by building friends and friends-of-friends machines. But we're talking pre-IDE hard drives (MFM, and they weighed like 5 lbs each), AMP and Molex connectors out the ass, back in the day when you could plug ribbon cables in backwards and have nothing work at all

Back in those days, and up to the early pentium era, I could spout off all the technical jargon and knew all the ins and outs of building a machine. But about the time the tech bubble crashed in 2000 (Jesus, was it really actually 20 years ago?) and I was out of work for 3 years--and then it was another 3-5 before I had disposable income again, technology passed me by. And I never have been bothered to catch back up except on a very surface level.

 

[Terrik]

I don't know what you plan to do with your second hard drive, how fast it needs to be, how many transactions per second it needs to support, but if it's just going to be a place to store stuff, you can always just get a plain old SATA SSD for storage if you don't want to go HDD.

--Patrick

Gaming mostly. Want to start migrating games over. At any rate I ordered a 970 pro that should come tomorrow. Hopefully THAT will work. It should anyhow, since that's what my other m.2 is.

 

[PatrThom]

I was out of work for 3 years--and then it was another 3-5 before I had disposable income again, technology passed me by.

Part of the reason I was stumping SO HARD to get hired into something tech-related at the time was exactly that--I knew that if I didn't either start making a bunch more money OR get into some kind of tech job, the world was preparing to move beyond my existing hardware knowledge (wrapping up the Pentium->Core transition on the PC side and PPC->Intel on the Mac side, and everyone was finalizing the move from PCI/AGP over to PCIe), and I had no money to purchase personal hardware to stay current. I probably put myself $25k or more in debt from 1999-2006 (which took many more years to pay back!) for what people kept telling me were "toys," but what that did was let me keep my personal knowledge going long enough until I finally did break into the tech field. Now keeping my eyes on the newest stuff is just part of my job, and I don't fall behind.

--Patrick

 

[GasBandit]

I'm still gaming off of SATA SSDs and people on faster SSDs load like 5 or 6 seconds faster than me. It's not worth the extra hassle IMO. We're not anywhere near the point where going from SATA to M.2 "feels" like going from platter to SSD.

 

[Terrik]

I'm still gaming off of SATA SSDs and people on faster SSDs load like 5 or 6 seconds faster than me. It's not worth the extra hassle IMO. We're not anywhere near the point where going from SATA to M.2 "feels" like going from platter to SSD.

Yes but you'd still game exclusively on windows 7 too given the choice.

 

[GasBandit]

Yes but you'd still game exclusively on windows 7 too given the choice.

If there's no performance difference, what does it matter?

 

[PatrThom]

We're not anywhere near the point where going from SATA to M.2 "feels" like going from platter to SSD.

What really matters for gaming is random read performance for small files at a very low queue depth*. Here's a typical CrystalDiskMark result for a PCIe v3 Samsung 970 (NVMe):

Samsung (and everyone else) advertises that maximum sequential speed up at the top (3.5GB/s - which is close to the maximum for PCIe v3) in all their ads, but for gaming the metric that matters most is that 4kQ1T1 number down at the bottom, which is only ~65MB/s! So how much of a difference does PCIe v4 make? Let's look at the Samsung 980 (NVMe):

Wow, that top speed is almost double, right? 6.7GB/s is close to the 7GB/s max for PCIe v4, but again, when you look down at the 4kQ1T1 numbers, we're only at ~88MB/s, which is only about 33% faster than the PCIe v3 970.

And what does a decent SATA SSD look like? Well, here's Samsung's SM951, which is not technically a SATA drive (it's AHCI), but is the absolute highest performance you're going to get from any SSD that doesn't use the newer NVMe protocol:

Ooo, almost 50MB/s of absolutely scorching /s 4kQ1T1 gaming performance. For the record, decent SATA drives clock in right around 33MB/s of 4kQ1T1.

So yeah, like Gas says, in the transition from SATA-III SSDs (max theoretical of 600MB/s) to PCIe v4 NVMe SSDs (max theoretical of 7GB/s), the metric most relevant to gaming performance has actually only gone up about 3x or so over the last 15 years.

...and now I'm gonna talk about Intel's "Optane" drives, which use a different method of storage that actually DOES improve gaming performance. Just how much? Well...

Okay over 200MB/s of 4kQ1T1 -- now we're talkin', right? Well...not so fast. Optane drives are ridiculously expensive compared to "regular" SSDs, and Intel stopped selling them to consumers anyway back in Feb 2021 so sorry, no blazing fast Optane gaming for you unless you want to buy used 280GB drives at about $600 ea or brand new U.2 enterprise 1.6TB drives for $3500. No that is not a typo.

EDIT: Reuploaded the pics with ones that indicate which line is the important one.

--Patrick
*The system can request multiple files, sometimes faster than the drive can respond (especially with HDDs). When the system requests things faster than the drive can fulfill those requests, that's when the "queue depth" piles up. A really fast drive will respond so quickly that the queue can't pile up much beyond QD1, so all these QD32 numbers are meaningless and only good for benchmark scores and marketing.