ASUS NUC 14 Pro stuck on black screen after reboot

I recently set up an ASUS NUC 14 Pro as a mini home server, but I ran into an issue where it refused to reboot, or to be more specific it would be stuck. A shutdown and manual power-on worked fine, but any attempt to restart resulted in a black screen with no response.

After some troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the storage drive. The NUC was running with a Crucial 2TB P3 Plus NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD, which seemed to prevent proper reboots. Swapping it for a Samsung 990 PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD instantly resolved the issue – reboots now work without any problems.

If you're facing similar reboot failures with an ASUS NUC 14 Pro, best check your NVMe SSD. Some models, like the Crucial P3 Plus, might have compatibility issues. A drive swap could save you a lot of headaches (and money).