Does it matter which sata port I plug a drive into?

[A Silver]

When I change my case I will obviously be unplugging my storage devices. Does it matter what sata port on the mobo I plug my C and D drive back into? If it plug the drives into a different port to what they are in moment, will the C and D drives get mixed up does it not matter?

[Bananasplit_00]

no, the BIOS will find what drive is bootable, boot of it and from there Windows handles it

[A Silver]

Just now, Bananasplit_00 said:

no, the BIOS will find what drive is bootable, boot of it and from there Windows handles it

Ok thanks! 

[Bananasplit_00]

Just now, L.Lawliet said:

Or sometimes it gets confused on finding the boot drives resulting in please insert a boot drive and restart...happens a lot in an old system..

i havent found that with my LGA775 systems, or anything more modern

[Bananasplit_00]

Just now, L.Lawliet said:

hmm i should record that when it happens  

sure, because i havent seen it ever and i have worked with, PGA478, LGA775, AM3(+), LGA1156, LGA1155 & LGA1150 and have never encountered any of this, to be fair my PGA478 boards i rarely work with and have just two IDE ports and no SATA, but the rest i have screwed around with loads with, swaped drives around and i have never experienced any issues myself. its probably not impossible, but myself i have never seen it  

[mariushm]

To be more thorough:

 

No, in general the connector where you plug a SATA device does not matter.

 

However, keep in mind that on some motherboards, a bunch of SATA ports are provided by the sata controller inside the chipset and a few sata ports are created by additional SATA controllers. If this is the case, some BIOSes may not automatically search for a bootable device in the sata ports that belong to these additional sata controllers so when you boot the computer, the BIOS may just say "No bootable devices found." or something like that.

 

Also, not that some motherboards these days have M.2 connectors which support m.2 devices that use either pci-e lanes OR sata connections. Usually, the sata connection in M.2 connectors is shared with one of the sata ports (usually the ones with higher numbers, like port 5 or 6 out of 6 SATA ports) so if you install a sata m.2 on your computer, that sata port would be unusable and that can confuse you if you plug your boot hard drive in that port.

 

Also, be aware that some have high end motherboards have u.2 connectors or some other fancy connectors which cause sata ports to be disabled if you start to use these u.2 connectors.

 

Some Intel chipsets also have a limited number of HSIO lanes which are then grouped into pci-e lanes, links to sata ports, to usb 3 ports and so on.  If you use too many pci-e lanes, some sata ports can become unsable because they no longer have HSIO lanes connected to them. Here's an example : http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-100-series-hsio-chipset,30210.html

The limitations should be explained in the motherboard manual.

 

Ok, hopefully i confused you enough for today.

 

 

 

[Odur32]

I don't know if this is relevant in your case, but for me, it actually mattered. Those ASMEDIA SATA ports on my mobo have a slower transfer speed than the ports on the main controller. This kneecapped my Samsung 850 Evo to under 300mb a second transfer speed until I moved them to the harder to get to (GPU Overhang) SATA ports.

[mariushm]

Just now, Odur32 said:

I don't know if this is relevant in your case, but for me, it actually mattered. Those ASMEDIA SATA ports on my mobo have a slower transfer speed than the ports on the main controller. This kneecapped my Samsung 850 Evo to under 300mb a second transfer speed until I moved them to the harder to get to (GPU Overhang) SATA ports.

Sure, that's because those controllers are connected to the chipset through a single pci-e v2.0 x1 lane, and that lane  has a maximum throughput of 500 MB/s ... after overhead and making data packets and all that, you end up with less than 500 MB/s for two SATA ports.