Best way to quickly disable a NVMe drive while testing overclocking

[lsevald]

I have gotten into the habit of disconnecting all my important drives when I test overclocking. Particularly when messing with RAM overclocking, as I have lost partitions in the past due to unstable RAM. Just relying on boot order to get the system to boot into a memtest86+ USB thumb drive, seems a bit risky. Easy to forget between BIOS resets and so on. And talking from experience, it really doesn't take many seconds for an unstable booting windows system to corrupt data badly. It doesn't happen often, but oh so painful when it does.

I'm getting ready for a new setup (new mobo, CPU, ram and ssd), and while waiting for Ryzen 3000 to release, I ordered a DDR4 RAM kit and my first ever NVMe drive.

This got me thinking. When the time comes, how do I disable the NVMe drive quickly between boots when testing RAM timings and such? With the old SATA drives, I would just leave my case open and unplug/plug the drives as needed. Not so easy with a NVMe drive?

 

[Athlonite]

Obviously the only real way to disconnect it would be to pull it from the NVMe slot it's only 1 screw and a pull not that much different from pull the power plug on SATA drives

 

[aQi]

Not sure about it but bios had the option to disable Sata ports. If you can see in your bios to disable m2 slot or something similar to that of PCIe.

 

[GoldenX]

Raise the base clock, mine disappears with a bclk over 102MHz.

 

[biffzinker]

Raise the base clock, mine disappears with a bclk over 102MHz.

Orly? Mine continues to show up at 103 MHz but the whole system is unstable unless I turn off XFR and PBO.

 

[EarthDog]

If you raise bclk, you are adding another variable for instability.

Your bios should have the option to disable the port.

 

[lsevald]

Thanks guys. I realized after posting yesterday, that a full BIOS reset is not so common these days, as BIOS usually has a failed overclock recovery function that disables oc only. And if you really have to do a full reset, you will most likely load a set of safe settings afterwards, instead of manually go through every setting again. I have no motherboard with NVMe yet, so hopefully there is something in the BIOS for this. Is it common for NVMe boards to have an enable/disable setting in BIOS for each of the NVMe slots?

 

[EarthDog]

Thanks guys. I realized after posting yesterday, that a full BIOS reset is not so common these days, as BIOS usually has a failed overclock recovery function that disables oc only. And if you really have to do a full reset, you will most likely load a set of safe settings afterwards, instead of manually go through every setting again. I have no motherboard with NVMe yet, so hopefully there is something in the BIOS for this. Is it common for NVMe boards to have an enable/disable setting in BIOS for each of the NVMe slots?

??????? Not sure what you are saying here...

There is always a 'load optimized defaults' option for loading the stock BIOS.

Some boards have that ability, I believe most do...

That said, you are really worrying about nothing. Its memory anyway, you don't own Ryzen, so there are little gains to be had in the first place. If I was you I would simply set XMP profile and leave it.

If you insist on meager gains from doing so, image your OS so just in case something goes wrong, you reimage in minutes (takes me ~10 with my latest image when sourcing it from an SSD).