M.2 disables SATA ports??

[idkwhatimevendoin]

Hi!

I'm gonna buy a 250GB M.2 SSD (Kingston KC2000) to use as my boot drive & store some apps/software on it. But there is something weird i found in the motherboard manual (Highlighted text in below image) does this mean SATA ports wont work? I was planning to reformat my current HDD to use as mass storage.

[Thomas_nerd]

what is the motherboard?

[idkwhatimevendoin]

Just now, Thomas_nerd said:

what is the motherboard?

GIGABYTE GA-Z97-D3H

[Princess Luna]

Yes if you use M.2 ports on this motherboar you will have your ports SATA ports #4 and #5 disabled.

[Thomas_nerd]

although you could just use 1,2,3,6

[Thomas_nerd]

and if you need extra ports you can buy a cheap sata expansion card on amazon for under £25

[TomvanWijnen]

SATA ports are generally numbered. Here they are saying that ports 4 and 5 (counting generally starts at 0) will be disabled when M.2 or SATA Express are used. Ports 0-3 (and 6-X) should not be affected by this.

[TempestCatto]

2 minutes ago, Princess Luna said:

Yes if you use M.2 ports on this motherboar you will have your ports SATA ports #4 and #5 disabled.

To add to what Lady Luna said, it's only two ports that get disabled. So you can still use your HDD as mass storage. You will be able to use all other SATA ports for any other drive you want, minus #4 and #5. They should be labeled on the board itself, if not, the manual likely will have a diagram of the board and show which ones they are. This is all completely normal across most, if not all, motherboards with M.2 slots.

[idkwhatimevendoin]

Thank you guys!

[mariushm]

My advice would be to just buy a SATA SSD instead of a M.2 drive.

 

With a 250 GB SSD, you're not gonna transfer tens of GB so that you'd actually be able to reach the 1-2 GB/s speeds the m.2 connector gives you.

For an operating system, majority of files are gonna be very small, in the megabytes to tens of megabytes, so your overall transfer speed won't get over a few hundred MB/s

 

 

[idkwhatimevendoin]

21 minutes ago, mariushm said:

My advice would be to just buy a SATA SSD instead of a M.2 drive.

 

With a 250 GB SSD, you're not gonna transfer tens of GB so that you'd actually be able to reach the 1-2 GB/s speeds the m.2 connector gives you.

For an operating system, majority of files are gonna be very small, in the megabytes to tens of megabytes, so your overall transfer speed won't get over a few hundred MB/s

 

 

Yeah that was my original plan, until I remembered black Friday is right around the corner. Also one day im hoping to switch my mass storage to ssd so i can get 500mbs transfer speeds. also i feel like its good to have the latest tech idk