WD 3D NAND M.2 Not showing in BIOS

Gepetto · 27 Dec 2020 at 11:34

I've upgraded the child's PC for Christmas and have put an existing WD 3D NAND 1TB M.2" drive into the Z490F Strix board along with his existing SSD. The board recognises the 2.5" SSD but not the M.2. After some investigation we have changed the SATA port that the SSD is plugged into as apparently this can cause a problem. The M.2 drive is still not being recognised.

I understood that a NAND drive was a different type of Flash memory but it has worked fine in my son's old PC so I'm a bit stumped. If anyone can point us in the right direction it would be appreciated as I'm becoming confused at all the different drive connections. SATA to me is a connector and M.2 is a different connector. The differences between NAND and NVMe are beyond me unfortunately.

EsaT · 27 Dec 2020 at 16:24

WD Blue 3D is SATA drive, no matter the physical shape/form factor and second M.2 slot of that board doesn't support SATA.
It's WD Blue SN550 you should have bought, if you want to use M.2 slot.
But in case of wanting to waste M.2 slot for drive which isn't any faster in it than in end the cable, use primary M.2 slot.
That supports both NVMe (PCIe) and SATA.

Gepetto · 27 Dec 2020 at 17:28

Thank you EsaT, you are an absolute STAR. :cool:

On re-reading the spec of the NAND drive it does indeed state that it is a SATA drive. This is not mentioned in the product title but it is mentioned in the description. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I have moved the M.2 to the 2.1 connector and now it is accessible. I note that the 2.1 connector disables the second SATA port when the M.2 Connector is used in SATA mode, which was the information I had found. The BIOS warned me on boot up.

Speed was not so much an issue in this instance as I figured I would just buy the cheapest 1TB M.2 drive for him because he was running out of space on his 500GB SSD.

EsaT · 29 Dec 2020 at 19:03

Gepetto said:
I note that the 2.1 connector disables the second SATA port when the M.2 Connector is used in SATA mode, which was the information I had found.

That kind of "sharing" I/O is common in nearly all desktop platform boards and pretty much standard in all but minimum slots having boards.

AMD's X570 is the exception to that with good amount more I/O connectivity and bandwidth than in others.
With PCIe v4 even x1 slot would give 2GB/s, which is four times the bandwidth of SATA.