My new SSD ate my old SSD - PCI-E slot SSDs

I’ve found this problem hard to Google due to ubiquity of the terms involved and the obscureness of the problem - but somebody here will know! :slight_smile:

I’ve a MSI Meg X399 Creation motherboard with first gen Threadripper. Bought TR because of the oodles of PCIe lanes and this board because of its included M.2 SSD extender x16 card which can take 4 M.2 SSDs.

I’ve filled the three motherboard M.2 slots and one of the slots in the extender card. FWIW, that last was my G: drive.

I’ve just, perhaps foolishly, bought that new WD Black AN1500 RAID M.2 device. My reading of my motherboard specs, I thought this would work in the last PCI-E slot. It’s PCI-e x8.

And it does work, but the drive in my original extender board has now vanished from Windows awareness. Doesn’t show up in Disk Manager and indeed Windows seems to think the new AN1500 device is the old disk giving it its G: allocation. Where’s the old one gone? I mean it’s physically there but nothing seems to know it. Have I blundered? Can I not have two PCI-e extender cards on my board or did I miscount the PCI-e lanes? Total compliment is a GPU in the first x16 slot, nothing in the second, the original MSI extender (x16) in the third and the new AN1500 (x8) in the fourth.

I had thought that I could make the new AN1500 my boot drive. It’s advertised as bootable. I don’t plan to upgrade to a new system for the next four or five years so this was supposed to help make the system last better over those years with its near PCI-e v4 SSD speeds.

I’ve blundered, haven’t I?

Duh! I missed some rather basic information!

Both the pre-existing M2 SSD in the MSI extender card and the new AN1500 drive show up in UEFI under “BBS Boot order”. So they seem to be detected by the hardware at least.

EDIT: And now after re-booting, BOTH of them are showing (though the AN1500 has still reclaimed the previous drive’s letter, that at least should be an easy fix). What is going on?

As I recall…

If you use a basic drive label under Windows (disk manager), drive letters get assigned based on order of bios detection. So your new drive is getting seen by the EFI before the existing one.

If you upgrade your drives a dynamic disk (label), then they get whatever drive letter you assign to them.

If you’re done adding drives, you should be able to re-assign drive letters using Disk Manager.

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