Laptop not detecting 2 SSDs simultaneously.

KiranAP · February 14, 2020

Hi, I have an Asus K53sm laptop, which is not detecting 2 Crucial MX500 2 TB SSDs simultaneously. I have inserted one in the Primary slot & the other in a Caddy in place of the optical drive. One of them is my boot disks which work fine. But the other is not detected in windows at all. However it works perfectly in an external enclosure. I have tried to insert another HDD (Toshiba drive 1 TB) along with my primary SSD and it works fine. Can anyone help? is it a hardware limitation OR I need to enable some option in BIOS?

TrigrH · February 14, 2020

have you checked disk management?

RageTester · February 14, 2020

Why don't you stick with SSD + HDD, and use 2nd SSD as external backup? SSD gets warm and caddy would only make it worse, also optical bay could limit the speed...

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There are a few reasons this could happen:

Check the power requirements of the SSD. The optical drive caddy uses a slimline SATA power connector, which is shorter than a normal SATA power connector and doesn't have the 3-volt and 12-volt lines that a normal SATA power connector has. The slimline variant only uses the 5-volt line. If your SSD needs the 3-volt line, it won't work. The power requirement should be on the label or in the box it came in.

Optical drives are inherently SATA-1 devices because they don't need the bandwidth that SATA-2 and SATA-3 provide. The SSD, on the other hand, does require SATA-3 speeds. Your model laptop came out right around the time SATA-3 was becoming a thing, so I don't know if it has SATA-3 ports or not. But this could be the issue if the firmware won't accept a high-speed device on the opti-bay's connector (or if the drive doesn't handle a SATA-2 port properly). You can test this by hooking up your internal HDD to it and see if it works. If it doesn't, this is probably why. I've seen jumpers on spinning hard drives that you can use to limit their bandwidth to SATA-1 speeds, but I've never seen this on an SSD.

It's possible that the SSD is getting too much interference from nearby components. As stated previously, optical drives operate at SATA-1 speeds, so interference isn't as much of a problem for them as it would be for an SSD. This is an issue in older MacBook Pros, where the opti-bay SATA connector is right next to the Wi-Fi antennas. Some laptop models place the SATA connector right next to the CPU or the RAM, which are both high-speed devices. Most laptop manufacturers don't take shielding into consideration when placing components near the optical drive (not even Apple with their legendary build quality). And why would they? The interference is low enough for the optical drive to work fine, so that's all that counts as far as they're concerned.

Kisai · February 14, 2020

2 hours ago, KiranAP said:

Hi, I have an Asus K53sm laptop, which is not detecting 2 Crucial MX500 2 TB SSDs simultaneously. I have inserted one in the Primary slot & the other in a Caddy in place of the optical drive. One of them is my boot disks which work fine. But the other is not detected in windows at all. However it works perfectly in an external enclosure. I have tried to insert another HDD (Toshiba drive 1 TB) along with my primary SSD and it works fine. Can anyone help? is it a hardware limitation OR I need to enable some option in BIOS?

Check the BIOS to make sure that the SATA ports for those drives are turned on. If you are using SDD's or HDD's on the motherboard, you should use the ports that are attached to the PCH and not an Asmedia extensible bus chip. Usually the motherboard will only have 4 or 6 of these.

It's also possible that you might be using Molex-to-SATA power adapters which wouldn't carry 3.3V, but according to the spec sheet for the Crucial MX 500, it only uses the 5V lines.