Gigabyte NVMe 1TB bizarre behaviour

[dewie93]

In my system I have 2x 1TB NVMe drives, a boot drive which is a Toshiba 1TB, and a Gigabyte 1TB which is used for the majority of my games. 

A couple of weeks ago steam showed a number of my games were not installed and this is the first time I noted this issue - My drive, called Games (H:), was showing in Windows Explorer, I can open it, and browse to a certain sub-level, then Windows throws an error 'a device that does not exist was specified'. 

 

I switched the SSD's around as my board has 2 M.2 slots and voila, it has worked for the past couple of weeks without issue, games loading fine, read/write tests show good performance etc. 

 

I've come back to my system today after using it fine on a couple of games yesterday and I am getting the exact same message. Is this a Windows/driver issue, a motherboard or BIOS issue, or a drive issue?

 

I'd like to switch them back around but it is a huge faff with removing the glass door, removing the GPU, removing both SSD covers/heatsinks for the issue to just come back or not be resolved at all.

 

Specs:

i9-9900k

Maximus XI Hero (BIOS updated to latest)

64GB Corsair RGB PRO 3200

RTX3080