> always unplug any other drives when installing Windows!
Many motherboards and enterprise notebooks have functionality to disable SATA/NVMe ports, so there's increasingly less need to faff with physically unplugging discs.
It's easy when SATA drives are stacked to unplug the ones you want.
It's not easy when M.2 requires removing a heatsink to press the PCI-e unlock to extract the 2 ton GPU to access the primary M.2 slot underneath to use your screwdriver on the screw the size of a PopRock clinging on trying to not shake because it's holding onto the screwdriver with the magnetic force equivalent of a fridge magnet.
Swapping the actual nvme drive out is easy. But then getting that screw back in is even worse than removing it. Sometimes you get lucky and the motherboard is improving the hotswapping capability with the newest yearly reimplementation of a screw with a string on it so if your screwdriver has trouble holding a fridge magnet against the gravity of the earth then the string keeps the screw from phase warping. My favorite has been the rubber peg designs but we're 10 years out from combining the peg with the string tech.
That's when reading the manual to figure out the port numbers to disable in the BIOS makes sense. It just seems like missed opportunity they didn't make M.2 external facing.
Too bad my Lenovo lets me disable the SATA but not NvMe :(
Plus I remember doing this for years under bios until some version of NT6 came along and Windows could access them even when disabled in BIOS on some mainboards.
Many motherboards and enterprise notebooks have functionality to disable SATA/NVMe ports, so there's increasingly less need to faff with physically unplugging discs.