600p ssd not recognized as boot drive in UEFI BIOS

[MLanc2]

MoBo: Gigabyte Aorus GA-Z270x Gaming K7

CPU: i7 7700-k (S-spec SR33A)

RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V (DDR4-3200; 2x8GB)

GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 (8GB DDR5X, 256-bit)

Storage 1: SSDPEKKW128G7X1

Storage 2: SSDPEKKW512G7X1

Optical Drive: HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW UH12NS40

OS: Win8.1 64-bit (will upgrade to win10 afterward)

Just setup everything (new custom build PC) and it POSTs with no issues.

Entered UEFI BIOS and accidentally disabled the SSDs from not menu while trying to change the ODD to first boot option.

Win8.1 64-bit will not recognize either SSD for OS install destination.

P.S.: I'd prefer to use the 128-GB as master and 512-GB as slave

[MLanc2]

I've also included photos of the drives recognized in BIOS, but unavailable (it seems to me) for storage drives, or otherwise inaccessible as well as a photo showing that no NVMe devices are detected..

[idata]

Hello Verloren81,

From what we can see on the pictures provided, you need to right click on the actual drives and select initialize.You can click on the area that says "disk" and click initialize.Please try that and let us know if it worked, as it is in the pictures, the drives will work as storage drives after you also create a partition on those. This is recommended to do if you want to use them to install the operating system to boot from.Regards,Nestor C

[MLanc2]

You mean to imply that I initialize and partition the drives through Disk Management, correct?

Since I've already installed the OS on the Samsung 850 EVO SSD, I'll just settle on using the Intel 600p 512GB for storage and dedicate the 128GB as a RAID or backup storage for the OS/System files, I suppose.

[idata]

Hello Verloren81,

That is correct, you can just go to disk management and initialize/partition the two Intel® SSD 600p series.After that, as you already mentioned, the SSD 600p 512GB can be just left as it is, to be used as storage, but we will recommend trying to install the operating system in the SSD 600p 128GB since this drive is faster than the other one you already have as a boot drive.The idea is for you to check if the installation can go through, after this change, and use one of the NVMe* drives for booting purposes.Please let us know if you can try this and provide any feedback about it.Regards,Nestor C

[MLanc2]

There are 2 partition styles (Master Boot Record; GUID Partition Table). What are the key differences between the two options and which do you recommend? Why might one be more effective than another?

My aim is to have a dedicated drive for the OS to limit clutter on it, thus cutting down potential for slowing down the read speed for that drive. I know, at least for HDDs, once you have reached about 1/3 capacity of the drive, it starts to slow down considerably. Is it the same for SSDs?