Hello!
I hope I am in the right place of this forum to post my question, if not please move it.

I am using a X99 system for about 2.5 years now and recently upgraded my CPU.
Before it was a i7 5820K (Haswell-E) and now it is a i7 6900K (Broadwell-E). The mainboard is a ASRock X99 OC Formula. As the system drive I use a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB NVMe drive attached to the Ultra M.2 slot of the board that directly connects with 4 x PCI-E 3.0 to the CPU.
The OS is Win 10 Pro Version 1607.

So after I exchanged the CPU Windows now shows the Samsung NVMe controller in the "safely remove hardware" list when I click the icon in the system tray bar. That wasn't there right before the change. I didn't change anything else, the BIOS of the board already has been updated to the latest version a few months before and Windows was at the same version too. The NVMe driver used was the one by Samsung version 2.2.

I already tried a few of the obvious things like - reinstall the NVMe driver. Update the driver to the latest 2.3 version. Remove the drive and controller from the device manager - reboot and let it be detected again. Checked every option in BIOS/UEFI regarding NVMe and SATA/Storage. All the HotPlug/eSATA features are disabled although they should not mention since the drive is not connected to the X99 chipset/storage controller.

When I open the properties of the drive in device manager and go to the policies tab I even can switch between "quick removal" and "better performance" which is strange since my other harddrives do not show these options (usually only USB drives do). Of course it is set to "better performance" and write caching is enabled.

Any ideas besides fresh reinstalling Win 10?
I have no problems with performance or anything, it just bothers me that it shows the NVMe drive at the safely remove hw icon.

I am 100% sure that it didn't show right before I shut down to switch the CPUs. Since the drive is directly attached to the CPU I somehow understand that it may was redetected by Windows upon CPU change, but why now as a removable device?

Hi Fernando and thanks for your response.
That's what I thought that it isn't normal to show that controller as being safely removable.

I was hoping to avoid a fresh reinstall.
I don't want to get rid of the icon as it doesn't really annoy me, I am just curious why that happend and maybe how to fix it.

Do you think that it does make sense to uninstall the Samsung NVMe driver and revert to the microsoft one and reinstall the Samsung driver? Do I have to expect any troubles in that procedure?

You were right. Even with the standard Microsoft NVMe driver it shows in the lower right corner to be safely removed. I installed the Samsung NVMe driver again and no change.
Guess I have to live with it.

It's strange that the drive itself doesn't show - it just says "safely remove - Samsung NVMe controller" or "Standard NVMe controller" if I use the MS one.

I know this topic is quite old, but I was facing the same issue on an X99 Taichi. The solution was to swap the SSD with the M.2 slots further down the board.