970 EVO

Yeah, in short, these are the crème de la crème of SSDs and what every data center and AI slop shop is gunning for. These are basically considered enterprise class devices these days and price reflects it. DRAM cacheless SSDs are a lot more affordable with write penalties that may legitimately cause

You may be interested in Samsung 970 EVO Plus, WD Blue SN570, or Kingston NV2. Any of the Gen3 NVMe drives will work well, as they are all fast and quite easy to find when compared to Crucial. Just select the one that is the cheapest for you.

i feel you on this one - same thing happened to my samsung 970 evo after three years. that red highlight usually means the bios sees the drive but can't boot from it. first thing - grab a usb stick and make a bootable hirens bootcd pe on another pc to test the ssd health. samsung magician software c

had a similar issue with an inspiron where the ssd would overheat and disconnect. flipping it over to cool down is a big clue - the controller chip might be failing when hot. first run dell's built-in diagnostics (spam F12 at boot). if that passes, back up anything important asap. you could try a co

I use Samsung 970 EVO 500GB without any problems with Pi 5.

Curiosity questions and notations, not meant to be rude: Why did you go with Intel 1700 socket and not 1851, the 13th and 14th gen are known to kill themselves and the U5-245K(1851) is a really capable CPU, and 1851 CPUs don't run hot and is roughly the same speed, plus the lack of hyperthreading al

i ran into this exact thing on my g5 last year. the ssd probably died - pretty common after a year. try reseating it first just in case, but honestly youll likely need a new one. what helped me was grabbing a samsung 970 evo plus, its been solid. before buying though, boot from a usb windows install