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Thread: Sata ports

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    Default Sata ports

    Son bought a new motherboard and the Sata Ports are listed as A,B,5,6,7&8.

    What are A&B for, and what happened to 1,2,3 & 4 ?



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    Make/model of motherboard would be helpful.

    It's likely the A/B are for the higher transfer speed 6Gb/s SSD's (often called SATA III or SATA 3.0) and the other ports are likely 3Gb/s.

    SATA 6Gb/s is backwards compatible with lower speed SATA drives.

    Check the MB specs.

    Don't know why there's missing numbers... unless they are hidden somewhere else on the board.
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    Quote Originally Posted by mtv View Post
    Make/model of motherboard would be helpful.

    + 1 on that =)

    If it's a newer mainboard with M.2 ports, it may have 2 SATA controller chips. with one of them doing the M.2 port service...which on some mainboards disables up to the first 4 SATA ports....(actually, the M.2 port utilizes a number of PCIe lanes that SATA wants to use).....the actual nomenclature and ports assignments differs from board to board, BIOS to BIOS...etc...

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    Mag b660m

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    What I suspected....


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    Yes I know the specs.
    Just trying to understand the reasoning/logic for the naming.

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    Ahhh..OK....SATA ports 1 to 8 relate directly back to SATA ports provided by the intel 660 PCH (mainboard chipset).

    However, 4 x PCIe lanes are connected to the ASMEDIA ASM 1061 controller chip, which means the i660 PCH cannot provided SATA ports 1 thru 4 inclusive...(and SATA port 8 in some usage scenarios)

    The ASMEDIA ASM1061 provides 2 x highspeed SATA ports, which using ASMEDIA's nomenclature is SATA ports A & B



    That's all there is to it...(had to peruse the datasheets...manufacturers don't cough up much detail =)

    edit: as for any reasoning/logic behind all of this, the best I can fathom is they're providing maximum compatibility for the various incantations of M.2 storage devices out there.
    edit2: the actual rock and a tight place here, is M.2 NVMe support ~ AMD chipsets/Ryzen CPUs have 4 additional PCIe lanes to CPU for handling NVMe ; not so for intel chipsets/cpus
    Last edited by wotnot; 15-06-22 at 02:10 PM.

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    Had heaps of problems getting it all going.
    Started with
    A = C Drive SSD
    B = D Drive DISC
    4 = E Drive SSD
    5 = F Drive SSD

    Would not boot.
    With only C connected would boot.
    Add D also would boot.
    Add any other drive and it went west.
    After much mucking around,

    4 = C SSD
    5 = D Disc
    6 = E SSD
    7 = F SSD
    8 = G Disc
    A = H SSD
    B = I CD Drive

    Rock solid. Go figure !

    Also 3 out of the 4 Sata leads supplied with the Motherboard were faulty.

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    Goodgrief....what a muck-around ; kinda makes me glad I never buy intel =) Might be an idea to keep an eye out for BIOS updates...also, what other PCIe cards are in the system? Even that matters with these setups....

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    You have no idea how hard this was.
    Would work with 3 Drives and as soon as you added the next, one would disappear.
    This Motherboard does not have BIOS ! Some new scheme instead.
    Also MBR is not the way to format Drives. Win 10 or " Bios " problem, not sure.

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    Yeah, MBR is dead....effectively ; have to use GPT these days

    edit: and yes you're correct ~ 'old habits die hard' and I still refer to it as BIOS, when really it should be called 'platform firmware' rightfully speaking 8)
    Last edited by wotnot; 19-06-22 at 01:47 PM.

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