What is ASATA?

[Taintedmind]

I've been doing some research to see what type of connections are on a motherboard for a basic home PC build I'm looking to do and I've noticed there's an ASATA plug.  I've never seen or heard of one prior and I'm wondering what it is, if someone could help me.  I know SATA I, II & II, along w/M.2 Sata/NVMe, but I've never heard of ASATA.

Motherboard:  AMD B450 AORUS Motherboard

 

User Manual Link:  http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Manual/mb_manual_b450-aorus-m_1001_e.pdf

 

If anyone would be able to explains what the differences are and what they're for, it would be greatly appreciated.  Also let me know if the 2 SATA cables that come w/this motherboard are SATA III or which version they are; thank you!

[Jurrunio]

Probably Auxillary SATA, gained with extra Asmedia or Realtek chip? Not sure.

[SupaKomputa]

If there's ASATA maybe there's a BSATA that is not enabled.

[Kedohawyr]

Ryzen CPUs have 2 integrated SATA ports in addition to the SATA ports normally provided by the motherboard chipset. This is similar to how most AMD and Intel CPUs now have at least some USB ports directly from the CPU in addition to whatever the chipset provides.

 

The detail that's important for you is that those 2 SATA ports (ASATA3) share pins with PCIe lanes coming off the CPU. On your motherboard those lanes lead to M2A_SOCKET which means that as soon as you put something into the M.2 slot you lose both of the ASATA ports.

[Taintedmind]

5 minutes ago, Kedohawyr said:

Ryzen CPUs have 2 integrated SATA ports in addition to the SATA ports normally provided by the motherboard chipset. This is similar to how most AMD and Intel CPUs now have at least some USB ports directly from the CPU in addition to whatever the chipset provides.

 

The detail that's important for you is that those 2 SATA ports (ASATA3) share pins with PCIe lanes coming off the CPU. On your motherboard those lanes lead to M2A_SOCKET which means that as soon as you put something into the M.2 slot you lose both of the ASATA ports.

Is ASATA faster than SATA by any chance or is it irrelevant?

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, Taintedmind said:

Is ASATA faster than SATA by any chance or is it irrelevant?

They're SATA ports that can be used if you want instead of the M.2 slot. There's nothing special about them.

[mariushm]

The Ryzen CPUs are system-on-chip, they have sata and usb controllers inside.

So in this case ASATA refers to SATA ports connected directly to CPU.

The other ports come from chipset.

 

In other context it may refer to extra sata ports created using an AsMedia sata controller.

Such chip could be connected to chipset using pci-e 2.0 x1 link, which means max 500 MB/s..

So both sata ports each max ~560 MB/s both together may not do more than 500 MB/s..

 

[Taintedmind]

Just now, mariushm said:

The Ryzen CPUs are system-on-chip, they have sata and usb controllers inside.

So in this case ASATA refers to SATA ports connected directly to CPU.

The other ports come from chipset.

 

In other context it may refer to extra sata ports created using an AsMedia sata controller.

Such chip could be connected to chipset using pci-e 2.0 x1 link, which means max 500 MB/s..

So both sata ports each max ~560 MB/s both together may not do more than 500 MB/s..

 

Is one better than the other to connect to, if there's a recommendation?

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, Taintedmind said:

Is one better than the other to connect to, if there's a recommendation?

No, it's giving you a choice/decision.

 

If you want to plug in an M.2 storage device, you can, but just be aware those ASATA ports will become unavailable. If you want to plug in more normal SATA connector storage devices than the four the motherboard comes with, you can, but you can't use an M.2 storage device.

 

There's no recommendation for using one or the other if you aren't using more than four normal SATA storage devices. This is not a performance decision, it's a configuration one.

[Kedohawyr]

12 minutes ago, Taintedmind said:

Is ASATA faster than SATA by any chance or is it irrelevant? 

I'd say it's irrelevant. If someone wanted to split hairs they could say that the ASATA ports have slightly less latency but I think even a benchmarking program would struggle to detect the difference. The only reason I'd use those ports over the others (and personally I'd use the others first since they don't interfere with the M.2) is if you've managed to bottleneck the system on the chipset link and I don't think you're going to do that.