Yes, but I have been intentionally not doing that. When I first set my system up I had done it in SATA/AHCI mode. I hade some other problems and ended up doing a full windows re-install and had switched it back to RAID mode in the bios before installing since I had read a few things about the intel RST driver being more performant even in non-raid setups. And I think I did see a bit of a disk performance increase after doing some benchmarking on my second windows install. So even if switching it to AHCI mode fixes the issue, I'm not sure I would really want to run like that full time. Unless you think that there really isn't a performance difference between intel RST driver and windows nvme driver?
Additionally, it seems really weird that that would be the issue since the drive does show up sometime even with my bios in RAID mode.
I do feel pretty confidant that it is some kind of software issue though since replacing my motherboard, the sata cable, and trying multiple 2.5inch sata disks have not solved the issue.
At this point, I don't really plan on investigating more. I'm running my main system and data on 2 nvme drives. It would be really nice if the sata bay worked, but not a deal breaker for me.
Thanks for the link! It's interesting to see that others were experiencing similar issues with nvme drives. I have only been experiencing this with my 2.5inch sata ssd/hdd.