Thanks for the reply!

I notice that we have the exact OPPOSITE scenario; cold boots for you are warm boots for me, and vice-versa. That's way too on the nose to be a coincidence, right?

I too saw those threads and tried that setting, and no joy here. Resize bar doesn't appear to be related either, but it was a setting I was playing with.

I have four drives so even if I go back to the Gen5 port (and force my card back to X8 instead of X16), I'm still short 500GB 😞

I hope we see a fix or something. I'm going to try disabling fast boot on my PC to see if that helps next.

UPDATE: Disabling Fast Boot did not solve this issue. Back to the drawing board...

UPDATE #2: I tried manually defining the PCI Gen (4) of the two SSDs I have in the card. So far... that worked... but I need to test more to see if that was truly the fix. I also cold-booted right into BIOS and verified that all 4 of my drive (2 on the card, two on the motherboard) showed up and they had. I'll continue to test.

pittfurg wrote:
UPDATE #2: I tried manually defining the PCI Gen (4) of the two SSDs I have in the card. So far... that worked... but I need to test more to see if that was truly the fix. I also cold-booted right into BIOS and verified that all 4 of my drive (2 on the card, two on the motherboard) showed up and they had. I'll continue to test.

Would be great if that solves the problem... Please do report back after more testing! I'd really like to move the drive I have in M.2_3 back to HyperM.2_2, as it ran much cooler there (the HyperM.2 card has a terrific heatsink!).

Alright more updates... and frankly, it's good news/bad news.

To recap: if you look at my first post, I state that I have the two WD drives in the HYPER M.2 card, and my trusty 860 EV0 AND 970 PRO in the non-PCIE 5.0 slot. After messing with the configuration some more, it wasn't helping; any time I warm booted (not restarted) or cold booted the system (via unplugging it) the drives will both not show; one will be either missing or "unreadable" by the OS. However, a reboot fixes this... or, if I manually enter BIOS on a cold/warm boot, it works.

At that point, I had a decision to make: after reading up on the WD drives I decided that perhaps this was firmware related (the drive had issues on X570 boards, not applicable here, but I found that interesting). I decided to cut my losses, and I returned the drives to MicroCenter and came home with two SAMSUNG 980 PROs (same capacity; 500GB).

I then rearranged the drives in my setup:

Hyper M.2_1:: SAMSUNG 960 EVO 500 GB
Hyper M.2_2: SAMSUNG 970 PRO 512 GB
M.2_2: SAMSUNG 980 PRO 512 GB
M.2_3: SAMSUNG 980 PRO 512 GB

And... now I'm not having issues; cold boots, warm boots, restarts... all drives are showing up and are accessible.

So that leads me to a couple interesting conclusions:

1. The HyperM2 Card is very picky about what drives it will accept?
2. Whatever my issue was, it seemed to be tied to some kind of (lack of?) latency on boot; perhaps the system wasn't given enough time to recognize the drive(s)?
3. I can't fully rule out setting the PCIE speeds as described in the above post; I have not turned that back to "AUTO" since I've had this working (letting a sleeping dog lie for now)

I do still want to attempt to RAID 0 the two new drives, but I'm going to wait this out to make sure it remains stable.

For those reading this thread, it would be interesting to hear which drives you're currently experiencing issues with. Perhaps this is a controller-based issue on the drive itself?

EDIT: Also, worth mentioning: as of this (updated) post, both of my drives (the WD and SAMSUNG) are listed on the QVL for this board.

@pittfurg - I have seen other threads referring to "disappearing drive" problems with the WD SN850. I didn't follow them closely so not sure which bios/etc or any resolutions since I don't have that drive, and I don't think those reports involved the 690-E or HyperM.2 card. But maybe the WD SN850's (or certain firmware versions on them) are just really sensitive?

@STARRAIN@ROG - I originally experienced HyperM.2_2 disappearing on bios 1304. I thought I had re-tested with 1403, but after your post I checked my build/test notes and saw that I had not tested this after flashing 1403. I had seen another report from someone with the same issue who said 1403 did not fix the issue and accepted that as true.

So, I reconfigured the system by moving the Samsung 980 Pro 1tb from M.2_3 back into HyperM.2_2, alongside the other Samsung 980 Pro 1tb in HyperM.2_1. This is the configuration where I experienced problems before. I then performed multiple iterations of testing (6) different scenarios:

1) After Windows 11 shutdown, complete power off (power supply OFF). Power on and boot to Win11.
1a) Enter bios during boot, check whether drives are visible in bios, exit and let boot continue to Win11.
1b) Allow normal boot progress without entering bios.

2) After Windows 11 shutdown, power supply still ON. Start system and boot to Win11.
2a) Enter bios during boot, check whether drives are visible in bios, exit and let boot continue to Win11.
2b) Allow normal boot progress without entering bios.

3) After Windows 11 "Restart."
3a) Enter bios during boot, check whether drives are visible in bios, exit and let boot continue to Win11.
3b) Allow normal boot progress without entering bios.

When I was using bios 1304, scenarios 1a, 2a, 3a, and 3b FAILED. The HyperM.2_2 drive was not detected in Windows 11, even though it was visible in bios (1a, 2a, 3a).

Now with bios 1403, all six scenarios SUCCEED. Both HyperM.2 drives are consistently detected in bios and Win11. (Note - Above testing was not with "optimized defaults". I did reset to optimized defaults immediately after flashing 1403, but subsequently made changes and did NOT revert to defaults for the above tests. Changes include disabling PCI Express Native Power Management, Setting Graphics Primary PEG and Multi-GPU disabled, Disabling Wifi and Bluetooth, Disabling Fast Boot, and setting Q-Fan configs).

So... My conclusion now is that the problem I experienced with HyperM.2_2 not being detected by Win11 has been fixed by bios 1403. Thank you for prompting me to reconfigure and test again!