I have a Samsung 970 EVO and a 980 Pro in my AMD R9-5950X 128GB RTX-3080 system, they have always been good.
I’m just worried about compatibility with this ASUS Workstation motherboard, it is finicky.
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UPDATE FOR 2023-09-10
The new Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe drive showed up today.
The W790 ACE doesn’t see it AT ALL. NEVER. What a lemon this board is.
Not even after multiple bootups. Not even with Link set to Gen3 or Auto.
I put the WD SN770 back in, it sees it again, but randomly loses it.
I don’t know what to do now.
This is costing me $200 for every test to see what works and what doesn’t work for drives.
So far I have spent $1100 on four drives, and only one of them works in the motherboard.
ASUS Support told me that I have “defective drives”, yeah, four brand new different drives are defective.
And this is after multiple BIOS updates to the latest version.
ASUS gets a complete FAIL on this one.
The WD SN850X 4TB still works fine.
Maybe I should just buy another one of those to put into it.
That is another $470 though.
But I don’t see where I have any other choice.
Unless I just live with the disappearing 2TB WD SN770, and constantly check the BIOS on boot to see if it is recognized, and reboot as necessary. 
My experience with these companies is to tell them I’ll report to the local customer protection department - usually they’ll immediately give you a full refund.
Although I don’t know if there’s one where you live.
And then without the motherboard, what am I supposed to do with $10,000 in parts that won’t do anything?
The only competing motherboard is the ASRock W790 but it won’t work for my setup.
UPDATE FOR 2023-09-11
ASUS replied to me again.
Instead of fixing the issue, they are saying they will RMA my board.
I fail to see how RMA-ing a board is going to fix BIOS and design issues.
I will guarantee that the next board will have the identical problems.
@wendell - Any chance that you have access to a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB that you could try in your ASUS W790 ACE motherboard?
On my board, it is never detected at all, even with multiple power cycles.
I can send you my new 980 Pro I just bought if you need one to test with.
I decided to purchase a WD SN850X 2TB drive, since the SN850X 4TB seems to always be detected.
Fingers crossed it will work. Maybe something with its specific controller is detected.
I can’t see this being a defective motherboard, the WD SN850X 4TB works in either slot just fine.
So I don’t have a bad slot or issue detecting that drive.
It has to be BIOS support for detecting the controllers on the other drives that is poorly written.
It would be nice to get confirmation from another ACE owner if they are having the same issues with these other drives.
The drive that works: WD SN850X 4TB.
The drives that don’t work: WD SN770 2TB (I tried two of them), Samsung 980 Pro 2TB.
And I now have a WD SN850X 2TB drive coming in the mail.
Congratulations! I’m not being sarcastic, their support is really lackluster. Ask me how I know.
Does the X13SWA-TF satisfy your needs? It even comes with an AST2600.
Also, If you’re doing for business - maybe it’s a good excuse to buy from system integrators?
e.g. Supermicro, falcon northwest
Supermicro almost always has basically zero chipset and VRM cooling, so unless you put them into server cases with blower fans, they run too hot.
I need this system to be silent.
Supermicro also never has enough I/O, I need a bunch of rear panel USB ports for kbd, mouse, cam, controller, capture etc.
That board also only has a single 1GBe NIC and I require 2.5GBe minimum.
I only use Supermicro boards in actual servers, I don’t use them in desktops because of a lot of reasons, IMHO they don’t make desktop boards.
Falcon etc for a W-series workstation build typically uses either the ASRock or ASUS W790 motherboard. So I’m back in the same boat.
Thanks for your comment though, I appreciate it.
Yeah, I can see the tiny heatsink. Although they do sell a prebuilt tower with this mobo (2x120 front fans), so it might be doable - but you’ve got more experience than me so I won’t judge.
I suppose you’ve used all your pcie slots, and can’t find enough high quality USB hubs. I can feel the pain.
This is my point: it’s the same mobo - but for the pieces that you buy from them (ssd included), you don’t have to worry about the combination not working.
They’re bloody expensive for what they are (esp. storage and ram), but if you think how much money you could’ve made with your new system for 1 month, it might be an overall cheaper choice.
UPDATE 2023-09-17
The brand new Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe M.2 drive that I bought for my workstation that didn’t work at all…
I just tried it in a second computer here, and that doesn’t see it at all either.
So that is the last three NVMe drives that I have bought from Amazon, all in sealed packages, all dead!!!
So that is why the Samsung 980 Pro didn’t work in my workstation…
Do these companies not do Quality Control any more?!?!
I have a new WD SN850X 2TB drive coming from NewEgg, it should be here in one or two days (Monday 18 or Tuesday 19), so I will try it and see if we are four for four with bad new drives…
UPDATE 2023-09-18
The WD Black SN850X 2TB NVMe drive that I ordered showed up today.
So far it is being recognized by the ASUS Pro WS W790 ACE motherboard every boot.
I need to try it 10+ to 20+ reboots to see if it fails to detect any time like the WD SN770 fails.
I tried two SN770’s and they both did the same thing. I also bought a Samsung 980 Pro but it was totally dead (tested in two computers).
I seem to have bad luck with these drives in this workstation.
I also have a WD SN850X 4TB drive in the system and it has always been good, so my hope is that the SN850X 2TB is the same.
I will post back in a few days after I have ran a bunch of reboots to see if the new drive is always detected.
But it looks like the WD Black SN770 does not run stable in the ASUS ACE motherboard.
UPDATE 2023-09-20
Three days of performing multiple power cycles and reboots and the WD SN850X 2TB NVMe seems to be working just fine. 
So the ASUS Pro WS W790 ACE motherboard does NOT correctly detect WD SN770 drives.
The ASUS Tech Support NA has been terrible to deal with, but at least after spending about $1300 on 5 NVMe drives for testing to see what will actually work, I now have a functional workstation system.
The ASUS QVL for this board is terrible and listed drives won’t even work properly.
Not very good QC, I’m really disappointed.
So buyer beware…
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ASUS NA Support keeps emailing me and telling me that my WD SN770 drives are all defective.
Even after I have told them multiple times that I tried TWO different SN770 drives, and they both have the same detection issue in both M.2 slots.
And that I now have those same SN770 drives installed in other computers and they work just fine!
And even after I told them that I had to spend $1300 on five different drives to find something that works in the ACE.
Which I found that the WD SN850X drives appear to work fine and are detected every time I boot.
Good luck to anyone dealing with ASUS NA Support!
I was lucky and I was able to return two of the drives since I don’t need five of them here.
And the fun with this Xeon computer continues…
Now the WD Blue 4TB Internal Hard Drive has started a low cycling buzz and vibration on the computer.
It makes the entire case vibrate. Annoying.
This drive is the robocopy mirror drive for my WD SN850X 4TB data drive.
Off to Amazon to spend another $130 on this computer. 
The WD 4TB Hard Drive finally showed up today.
So I installed it, and magically the bad vibration is now gone.
So I have a new month-old WD 4TB HD that has a bad bearing or something.
This workstation is FINALLY all completely working after months of hassles and woes.
Changing the M.2 NVMe drive from a WD SN770 to a SN850X cured the intermittent failing BIOS drive detection.
It boots correctly into Windows every time now.
And this new WD 4TB HD finally fixes the bad bearing in the original new 4TB HD that was vibrating the case really loudly.
It only ended up costing me almost $1500 extra buying drives to try to fix the issues in this workstation.
Argh!! The new WD Blue 4TB has a different vibration noise issue.
It sounds like the head is seeking continually.
Are all of these drives crap?
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Stop going for cheap as chips HDDs (SMR)?
Toshiba HDDs works great in my experience (MG0X and N-series) but that doesn’t mean you might get a dud like with everything else that isn’t pre-tested.
For NVMEs I’m sticking to P5 Plus unless there’s a specific case where I need to look at product characteristics.
So I tried four different hard drives in the system for my Data Backup drives, and they all make the case vibrate like crazy.
I mean like so loud that you can feel and hear it, it’s really annoyingly loud, loud speaking voice volume level.
And I tried various WD Blue and Red Pro drives, and they all do it with various different sounds.
After playing with it for a while, I determined that the Corsair 5000D drive cage just resonates and vibrates really badly when you put spinning drives in it.
The plastic trays just flop loosely in the metal cage, and any vibration is resonating.
What helps is to pull the tray part way out to the latches and have those press against the side of the cage, but it still makes some noise.
Corsair needed to put leaf springs on the sides of their plastic trays so that they had firm contact with the inside of the cage.
So I’m going to get rid of the hard drives and go with SATA SSDs.
This is a 2TB and 4TB drive that is my Data Robocopy and my OS Clone of my two WD SN850X NVMe drives.
Googling shows that Reddit and other sites have piles of posts on both the Corsair 4000D and 5000D making terrible hard drive noise in them.
I wish that I would have known before buying the case. Another Buyer Beware case.
And of course no word from the manufacturer on the issue and no fix.
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