WD_Black SN850 not detected by BIOS on bootup from power-off

I am having a similar issues with a 500gb sn850. I’m a total noob building my first PC, so hitting a wall where my motherboard won’t even detect the m.2 is so frustrating. Any word on a fix?

MB: MSI B450 Tomahawk Max II w/ Ryzen 5 3600
m.2: WD sn850 @500gb

I’ve heard bubkis. For those of you that are not seeing the drive at all, have you tried soft rebooting (i.e. ctrl-alt-del) into the bios to see if it appears? The original issue I am having is that the drive does not appear on a cold boot from power off but does after soft rebooting and works normally thereafter.

me problem is completly inverted… after energy save mode or anything else… the drive doesnt appear. then i must do a hard reboot (power off 3 secs) then power on and it will work…

I’ve been troubleshooting for 2 days now and have zero consistency other than if it does POST/boot, it won’t restart. I’ve recognized it in BIOS and even formatted one of the few times I was able to boot to windows with it installed. I’m currently going back to default BIOS with it removed and then installing the M2 to try 1 change at a time. Repeatedly if possible. Every time I think I have a trick or solution, it knocks me back down.

MOBO: MSI B550 GAMING PLUS
INSTALLING (as an addition): SN850
ON: M2_1

DISCREPANCY: Will not POST on my normal or default BIOS settings. I’ve read it can be XMP, CPU boost, and/or OC settings.

I have MSI Laptop Prestige 14 EVO A11M-220 Intel Core i7 11th Gen 1185G7.
External Acasis USB4.0 M.2 SSD Case 40Gbps M2 NVMe Case.
SN850 NVMe M.2 2280 1TB in the case.
I get a beep but no sign of a drive in file explorer. ctr/alt/delete has no effect. I assume I just should send it back and get a Samsung drive.

I took Phreedom’s advice and ordered the Seagate. I don’t see this WD issue going away. Thankfully I ordered the WD from Amazon and it’s going back.

Update: swapped at Best Buy for the Samsung 980 which worked right outta the box.

Good luck!

I went to WD and registered my SN850, followed several links of Martin Winkler, downloaded several helpful links from WD and even downloaded EdgeRover which helped me connect to my NAS. My SN850 is showing up as D drive now in file explorer as pretty as a picture. All is well on my MSI Prestige Intel version.

I think there may be more like me who thought of these small NVMe drives as simple plug and play. My first attempts at installation were more like how I would treat a thumb drive. After I registered it and started using help links the installation went pretty smooth.

I have the same SN850 2 TB nvme drive and my system wouldn’t boot with it in the primary nvme slot (the one controlled by the cpu). I had to move it to an nvme slot controlled by the chipset in order for my system to boot. I used another gen 4 drive (xpg gammix s50 2TB) in the same slot and it worked just fine.
My system is using a Gigabyte Z590 Vision G Motherboard, Intel Core i7 11700K and a Gigabyte RTX 3070 Vision OC Video card.

I have the same problem with my Lenovo Legion 5 Ryzen 7 4800H. Thought I would upgrade with the best SSD around but … as with you guys nothing. Lenovo are not much help as are WD, why, don’t they want our custom? Any help would be most appreciated as my new laptop only comes with 256Gb.

Hello folks,
I just build a new computer with 2 WD 850 1TB NVMEs. The first one works perfectly in the M2_1 slot which is CPU bound. The second one at the M2_2 slot has the same problem as the thread startet mentioned. The drive isn’t recognized at first boot afer a long power_off period. I alwas have to reboot the PCs to get the second NVME drive get detected and working properly.

I found a difference between the two drives in the WD Dashborad 3.2.2.9:

  • the first one, which is working perfectly has the model string WD_BLACK SN850 1TB
  • the second, foulty one, has the model string WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0

Both have the same firmware 613000WD and no update is availiable for this drives.

The rest of my system is an Asus B550-E strix with a 5900x CPU, Agesa 1.2.0.1 - 1.2.0.2 is still at beta status and I don’t wont to install any beta version until they’ll be released

So it seems it’s not only an MSI x570 problem …

Do you have any solutions or adviced in order to solving this problem?

I appreciate your help,
Dennis

Also have the issue where one of drives is sometimes not detected.

2x WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0
Transfer Mode: PCIe 4.0 x4
Firmware: 613000WD (and the version before).

Same here i have a

WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0 ( SN850 1 TB) - Latest Firmware
Motherboard asrock pro4 x570

Windows 10 is installed on the drive, and i tought that it was the old motherboard B450 M - Gigabyte , that was faulty, but the failure still remains,

After a couple of restarts bios detected my drive again, but cannot read from it. And windows cannot be installed to it… 5 times in 2 weeks this happend on the B450 board, on the asrock it is the first time in 1 month. But I don’t get it. I cannot attach any hardwareinfo because my pc is down at the moment.

Does anyone have a solution?

I have a Intel Nvme in M.2 Slot 2 which works fine and have always worked without any issue. I have tried to place the WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0 in an addon card on the B450 M , installed windows 10 on it and it crashes also in a couple of days.

Any suggestions? - is it because of the windows 10 cache?

I am frustrated :slight_smile:

After months of tech support researching the issue, they finally said to just RMA the drive. I’ll get the replacement next week, will update if it fixes the problem.

No, it won’t help! I got my replacement drive on friday, brand new, sealed.

I put it into my B550-E strix board in the M2_2 slot → no drive found in UEFi. In the meanwhile I also updated my board-bios, still no success!

Than I updated the firmware of the new drive, no changes.

Still no detection after cold-boot. So WD has to redesign the firmware/controller chip in ordert to get the 1TB drive working correctly in the AMD-chip adressed M2_2 slot.

@QuantumPion

Any updates with your replacement?

Yeah the replacement had the exact same problem. I ended up replacing my MSI motherboard with an ASUS because I was also having issues with my CPU. The replacement motherboard does not have the issue with the WD SN850. So it looks like it was the MSI motherboard and not the drive causing the issue.

Sorry, I’ve an Asus B550-E strix where the problem still occours after changing the “defective” to the “new” drive … so from my point of view it’s definitively the WD_BLACK SN850 1TB drive. In the meanwhile I got for testing purposes a Samsung 980 PRO 1TB, which worket perfectly out of the box.

What Asus board? Was it an x570 chipset? I need to replace my msi, but don’t want to have same problem again.

It was an MSI MPG-X570-GAMING-PLUS. However I suspect the problem was with my particular board being defective.