Issue with laptop recognizing ssd

Question

Hi! I have a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming Laptop that is about three years old, running windows 10. I am attempting to upgrade the storage it came with. Currently there is only an m.2 drive, and I wanted to install a 2.5 in. 1 TB SSD alongside it. After plugging the new drive in I loaded up Windows and found that it was not recognized by the Disk Manager or Device Manager. On reboot I found that the BIOS did not list it either. The issue is, after reseating it and trying again I found that both drives did show up in the BIOS. However after loading windows it once again did not show up. Basically it will continuously show up in the BIOS without issue, right up until I load Windows. Then it will completely drop off the BIOS until I reboot a second time. At no point have I seen it recognized by Windows, or seen it recognized by the BIOS immediately after loading Windows and rebooting once. I have limited experience with modifying the BIOS settings, but from what I can tell all the drives are enabled correctly. I believe this is the only available drive bay on the laptop. Thank you, any help or advice is appreciated.

ejn63 · Answer

Look under SATA Operation - is it set to RAID (which is the Dell default)?

You'll need to change it to AHCI before you'll see the second drive. Before doing that, you will need to alter your Windows configuration -- if it has been set up in RAID mode, you need to make a change before it'll boot in AHCI mode.

https://support.thinkcritical.com/kb/articles/switch-windows-10-from-raid-ide-to-ahci

Inspiron

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