SSD randomly disappears

Gravlok · October 22, 2020

I've got weird issue. I've bought Seagate BarraCuda 510 1TB NVMe drive. I've installed it into my MB (Gigabyte X570 Gaming X) without problems. I turned on the PC, went into UEFI to see if the system recognized it. It sure did. I've popped into the system and went straight to disk manager. I initialized the drive with GPT partition table and created 1 partition with full capacity, formatted the partition with default allocation size and NTFS file system. No problems here.

However...

This drive was supposed to be my "game drive" to lower the loading times. I've decided to test on something light. Genshin Impact it is. Downloaded and installed with no problems. Here's where it's get tricky. While loading the game, it threw me some kind of error of missing module (program stopped working because reasons) and the disk became unusable. Can't read from it, can't write to it. The error that pop's up tells me to "Make sure if the disk is in the designated location". Roughly translating. What I noticed is that when the disk behaves correctly, disk managers shows that the whole drive has been used for that single partition.

Fig. A - Normal operation (Zdrowy = healthy, podstawowa partycja danych = basic disk partition)

When the issue emerges, disk manager suddenly decides, that there are additional 2MB of space available at the end.

Fig. B - After error occurs. Magical 2MB of space appears

And finally when I hit F5 to refresh the page, disk manager states, that the disk has not been initialized.

Fig. C - the disk disappears and needs to be reinitialized

Rebooting the OS resets the situation. It works, I try to play, it gets screwed.

I've tried to:
- Reinitialize the disk (with GPT)

- Formatting the whole partition without "fast format"

- Reseat the drive in the MB

- Cleaned the drive contacts with Isopropyl alcohol

I'm kinda baffled. I've never seen such behavior. I could RMA it and get another one, but I want to exclude all possibilities before I send it out on warranty and have to wait for like a month or more.

Possible relevant information:
- OS: Windows 10 Education, ver 2004, compilation 19041.572

- I have other NVMe drive installed in the other slot (Transcend 110S 256GB, my system drive) and also have RAID 0 array created from two 1TB HDDs (hardware RAID ,configured in UEFI)

Please help me. Thanks in advance.