Failing GPU drivers after adding an extra SSD

[devosk]

Hi all,

My son owns a HP VIctus 16-d1007nb. 2 weeks ago he added an extra SSD to the laptop. The SSD is a Samsung 970 EVO (2TB). Since adding the SSD he had issues with the drivers of the graphic card (NVidia RTX-3060).

We downloaded the drivers from the HP site, from the NVidia site, reset to factory settings, ... but nothing helped. After removing the added SSD the system works without any problem. GPU drivers are recognized, installed and running without any problem.

When adding back the SSD the drivers fail again. When adding another SSD (make unknown but used from an older HP Desktop - 256GB) the GPU drivers are working normal.

How can an extra SSD block/disturb the GPU drivers? The SSD does not have any data on it yet.

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this so he can also use the extra SSD? 

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Kenneth De Vos

[TzortzisG]

Hello devosk.

You've pretty much already done your own detective work here. What you're describing is called a hardware conflict. Samsung drives are known for occasionally having incompatibility issues with modern HP laptops. Don't know why, but this is why personally I steer clear of Samsung drives. This is a Gen3 SSD and your laptop's second slot is Gen3, so that's not it. The size is OK. 2TB should work. Trying another drive and having everything work perfectly fine pretty much assures us that the second slot has no issue either. The HP desktop drive works well, so I suggest you try one of the brands that are known to be ultra-compatible with HP's notebooks, namely Crucial and Western Digital.

[devosk]

Thanks for the response.

I think we just had some bad luck. We will try to return the Samsung SSD and get a Crucial SSD instead.

Kind regards,

Kenneth