Latitude 5531 2.5inch sata ssd randomly not showing up in windows 11

[Stephen01]

I recently purchased a refurbished latitude 5531 from dell's outlet site. I have windows 11 running on a samsung 980 pro nvme drive. I have a 2.5inch sata ssd plugged in to the internal bay as well. What I have been seeing is that it will randomly not show up and/or start showing up in windows. I have my bios set to raid mode and not sata/ahci. I have been working with dell tech support and just recently installed a new motherboard that they sent me and am still experiencing the same issue. There seems to be number of dell laptops that support this kind of configuration. Has anyone else ran into this weird intermittent issue?

 

I have tried 2 different sata ssd's and 1 sata hdd and experience the same issue with all of them. So not likely to be a drive issue.

 

[PHVM_BR]

1 hour ago, Stephen01 said:

I have my bios set to raid mode and not sata/ahci.

Try changing to AHCI in BIOS.

[Aaron44126]

6 minutes ago, PHVM_BR said:

Try changing to AHCI in BIOS.

 

Note this requires taking some steps to allow Windows to boot.

https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-64.html#post-11112315

[Stephen01]

On 3/23/2023 at 12:35 PM, PHVM_BR said:

Try changing to AHCI in BIOS.

 

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.

 

On 3/23/2023 at 12:42 PM, Aaron44126 said:

 

Note this requires taking some steps to allow Windows to boot.

https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-64.html#post-11112315

 

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.

 

[Stephen01]

Yeah, just went through switching to SATA/AHCI mode did a perf test in samsung magician and the results were worse than when running in RAID mode in bios.

 

SATA/AHCI:

Sequential Read: 5353 MB/s

Sequential Write:  4743 MB/s

Random Read: 237060 IOPS

Random Write: 230224 IOPS

RAID:

Sequential Read: 6449 MB/s

Sequential Write:  5065MB/s

Random Read: 879638 IOPS

Random Write: 719482 IOPS

 

That seems similar to the kind of performance increase I had seen when I had re-installed windows with RAID mode running the intel RST driver. So even though I'm not utilizing raid for my drives, the intel driver appears to perform better than the microsoft one for nvme.

 

For me, I would prefer my os and data drives running on 980 pro's be more performant and just deal with a 2.5inch drive that sometimes shows up rather than have a legacy drive always show up, but be running with less performant nvme drives.

 

Appreciate both of your replies though!

[SvenC]

Is it the 2.5 SSD which disappears sometimes?

 

I had an issue with some Crucial 2.5" SATA SSDs a few years back, which needed a "power cycle" to come back to life, like described here: usb - Power cycling SSD drive - Super User - so it is a bit different than your case, where the SSD comes back without those power cycle steps.

[Stephen01]

On 4/11/2023 at 11:30 AM, SvenC said:

Is it the 2.5 SSD which disappears sometimes?

 

I had an issue with some Crucial 2.5" SATA SSDs a few years back, which needed a "power cycle" to come back to life, like described here: usb - Power cycling SSD drive - Super User - so it is a bit different than your case, where the SSD comes back without those power cycle steps.

 

Yeah it's the 2.5 inch ssd that is disappearing, but I don't think it's the same issue you've mentioned. I've been able to reproduce my problem with a toshiba HDD as well.