Strange behavior with NVMe drive installed

Laptop is a Acer SF315-52 with i5 processor, 16 GB ram and a recently installed NVMe drive.

Since the installation of the NVMe drive, it has been booting strangely.
After selecting restart:
     1. The machine shuts down completely.
     2. pressing the power button does nothing.
     3. If I then close the lid and reopen .....
     4. Pushing the power button starts the machine normally ... EXCEPT
     5. The boot to my desktop takes about 45 seconds ! (which seems slow for a very fast NVMe drive)
     6. If I set the machine to hibernate when I close the lid, when I lift the lid and hit the power button
          the machine restores to the destop in under 5 seconds !

So here's the mystery ... why the odd behavior when restarting ? Have I installed the NVMe drive incorectly ?
(HDD has been removed BTW) In the BIOS there are 2 choices for the drive, either ACHI or "RST with Optane".
The machine will not boot at all if I set the drive to ACHI. In all other respects the machine performs very well.

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MaClane

Good night schuh8 !

What exact model of your laptop?
What is the exact model of your SSD?
Ever check if there is any firmware update for it?

JackE

schuh8

Have you removed the optane card? It may be confounding the BIOS. It only is for improving HDD performance, not SSD. The SSD should be set to achi. Jack E/NJ

schuh8

Optane card had to be removed as there is only one NVMe slot and that slot currently has the 1TB NVMe drive in it.

Laptop is Acer SF315-52-52G

SSD is:

addlink S70 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSD R/W 3400/3000MB/s Internal Solid State Drive

I am getting read/writes very close to what is advertised. The only problem is with booting from shutdown OR booting from restart. The key problem seems to be that booting is impossible unless the lid is closed and reopened.

Thans for attempting to help!

JackE

Have you tried to load BIOS setup defaults? Jack E/NJ

schuh8

Thanks for the suggestion Jack, but all bios settings are at default except the boot order which used to read disk 1 sata and now reads disk 0 PCie drive, as you would expect. The HDD has been removed.

JackE

At least you're getting expected speeds once booted. Some NVMEs don't behave very well. Some folks can't get them to work at all. Still bleeding edge tech relative to SATA3s. BTW, the specsheet lists 512GB as largest m.2. for available options. Maybe BIOS firmware is having some difficulty in accomodating the larger capacity m.2? Is ControlPanel power button app set for fast startup? Jack E/NJ

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/h8/8z682c5ubex1.jpg

schuh8

I saw the 512 GB limit before I purchased the 1 TB NVMe. But several sites including crucial guarenteed that a 1 TB drive NVMe would work, so I took a chance. Since I have the laptop set to hibernate when I close the lid, the strange booting behavior is only a minor inconvenience. However all that being said, the problem just doesn't "feel" like a problem due to too large a drive, mainly because it functions totally normally once booted, I can see and use the entire 1TB, and the fact that it will reboot reliably every time if I follow the weird booting procedure. Its closing the lid that is the key to rebooting and I'll be darned if I can understand why that would make a difference ! I suppose I can take some comfort that if its ever stolen, the thief will have a devil of a time using it

JackE

>>>Since I have the laptop set to hibernate when I close the lid, the strange booting behavior is only a minor inconvenience. As >>>

That's the spirit! As an aside, some have found that setting ControlPanel power button app to all sleep mode, none hibernate, and changing fast startup often helps to avoid unexplained annoyances like this. Jack E/NJ

schuh8

Again ... thanks for all the help Jack. I tried setting all to sleep and also with/without fast startup ... all to no avail.

BUT, I did discover some new things.

1. Shutdown works normally

2. after closing the lid and hibernating, there is no need to open and re-close the lid to start. If I just hold the power button down for 10 seconds, release and then push the power button again (quick push), it starts normally.

I think what this is telling me is that when closing the lid to hibernate, it's not really shutting down completely even though the screen appears to be completely off. Holding the button in does shut it down and then can restart normally.

JackE

Still, hibernate mode is a potential confounding issue even though it doesn't seem to power off. Because the initial part of the hibernation process calls for creating and writing system RAM settings etc status to a file hiberfil.sys. This gets loaded somewhere in the boot process but assumes RAM is cleared to start. I'm not sure what'll happen if RAM etc isn't really cleared but hiberfil.sys gets loaded anyway. Jack E/NJ

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