My internal drives are showing for some reason as removable in windows (one is SSD and the other is an HDD) in Windows 10 Pro.
I read somewhere this can affect performance.
Why is this? Is this defined in the BIOS or in Windows?
Is it possible to fix this?
This is NOT the same as How can I remove the option to eject SATA drives from the Windows 7 tray icon? since that question is for Windows 7 and the solution provided does NOT work for Windows 10.
The issue lies in your BIOS, and has little to nothing to do with Windows. Check if you can manage your SATA devices, and Disable the Hot Plug function.
As long as you use the microsoft AHCI driver: Check the properies of the drive in the device manager, note the "bus number". If it is Bus 0 it is this registry key for Win8/Win10:
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\Parameters\Device" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d 0
If it is Bus 0,1,2,3,4 and 5 use this:
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\Parameters\Device" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d 0\01\02\03\04\05
Reboot.
Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3083627/internal-sata-drives-show-up-as-removeable-media
I had the same problem with a Gigabyte P55-UD5 mainboard. With the default MS driver some internal drives showed as removable.
Because the drivers on Gigabyte's site were very old I used this post to find the newest one (in my case: 64bit Intel RST(e) AHCI/RAID Drivers v12.9.4.1000) and installed it via Device Manager, update driver.
Check Control Panel --> Device Manager --> Disks --> double click on the disk drives and make sure that under Policies tab drive 'write cache' is enabled and there is no 'optimize for quick removal' enabled. This is directly related with how windows considered or not a drive being removable.
Also, update to the latest chipset and AHCI/RAID driver.
Tip for Windows 10 users: create a 'Storage Pool' through 'Storage Spaces'. A Pool can exist of just 1 storage medium. That will integrate the removable storage to be seen as an internal drive.
It's not a solution for your system drive. For that the best bet is to find the most recent driver.If that does not work for you might want to change your 3rd party AHCI/RAID controller driver to the 'Generic SATA AHCI controller' that was shipped with Windows.
In my case I had disks attached to a Marvell adapter show up like that. After changing them to create an MS storage space instead of a Marvell mirrored drive they appeared in the normal spot thus making them available to disk optimization too.
I did all the above and my system still thought my two hard drives were removable drives but I did the following and It fixed the problem. Check Control Panel --> Device Manager --> Disks -->right click on the drive in question and select properties --> then select Volumes --> populate... this will identify the drive as a hard drive. Once done, reboot . All fixed.
This is generic problem of windows 64 bit versions. Microsoft has yet to find and fix the issue. It is related to performance. 64 bit operations cannot cope up so 64bit os is patched to treat internal drive as portable removable drive. Install 32bit version of windows, this issue is not there.
