My Storage is Not Detected

The most common reason a storage drive will not be detected after being properly connected is that the drive has not been Initialized.  While most drives will come pre-initialized out of the box from the factory, some drives may be shipped in an Un-initialized state or may not have their space allocated.

To fix this, right-click the Start menu and choose Disk Management.

Once in the Disk Management menu you should see all drives currently connected to your PC.  From here, you may see a Disk connected but the space will be listed as Unallocated.

Right-click the Unallocated Space, then select New Simple Volume.

This will open the New Simple Volume Wizard which will walk you through the creation process.  The wizard is incredibly straight forward, however there are a couple checkpoints we'll want to cover.

At the Assign Drive Letter or Path section, it is recommended to assign a letter.  Traditionally these will start with D: and go all the way through Z:.  If you need more drive letters, it may be time to look into alternative storage methods such as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) or to pair down drives.

At the Format Partition section, you'll be able to set a Volume label (name) for your drive, as well as select the File system.  If this is an Internal drive, it is recommended to use the NTFS file system.  For an external drive, especially one you want to use with another operating system such as MacOS or Linux, it is highly recommended to use either FAT32 or exFAT depending on the size of your drive.

Once the drive is Initialized, a window may pop up showing the newly detected drive as shown below:

One major reason a drive may not detect is due to the drive being loose or disconnected from its slot.  While this is less common with M.2 based storage, this can still occur if the drive was not secured to motherboard or was improperly secured.

When an M.2 based storage drive is secured to a motherboard, the edge connector should no longer be visible and the card should be parallel to the motherboard.

If you have a drive that uses a SATA connection, you will have two cable connections at the drive itself.  This will be a SATA data and a SATA power connection.  If either of these are loose or disconnected, the drive will not be able to detect.  Be sure to also check the SATA data connection at your motherboard as well as the SATA power connection at your power supply (if you have a modular power supply).

This is an issue mostly limited to Intel 10th Generation chipset (Z490, B460, etc.) and 11th Generation chipset (Z590, B560, etc.) motherboards.  These motherboards may have a designated slot that is only available when an 11th Generation CPU is present.  If you have one of these motherboards and are using a 10th Generation Intel CPU, this slot will be inactive and will not detect any connected storage.