[SOLVED] Intel DP55WG motherboard SATA Question

[williamnfb98]

I learned today about the SATA connections on the motherboard DP55WG and that 4 out of the 6 are useful to me and two serve no purpose so far. I have 4 Drives on the ones I can use including 2SSD 1 Spinning 2TB drive and one DVD drive. I learned that if I connect to the Red SATA connections on the board, windows 10 does not recognize that drive at all. That can explain why the second DVD drive was never used in the past and that was fine in a way. Today I attempted to connect a 2TB drive to the second red eSATA port on the board and that did not become recognized by the board. I have moved to having 2SSD 1 of the drives that has 2TB in size and one DVD drive left. The owners manual state 6 SATA connections but visually there are 4 black SATA ports that I connect the red cables to and 2 Red ports that state eSATA 4 and eSATA 5 on the board and they do not allow the computer to recognize what ever is attached to them for the operation of the computer.

There are some other specs about the computer and have had this system for a very long time. It operates windows 10 64 bit. The ram is 8GB between 4 sticks at 2 GB each. Video card of GEForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB. The processor is a Quad Core i5-750 2.66GHz LGA 1156.

One other item I learned when creating this computer in 2011 was based on processor, some of the video card features on the board are not functional in nature and that is why I use the video card and cannot use the connections from the board for video in nature. That could be part of the reason. I do want to understand what the red SATA items are and was not able to learn that today and searched a fair amount. Thank you very much.

 

[popatim]

The DP55WG has 6 black ports; not 4 black and 2 red. Please double-check your model#.

 

[williamnfb98]

I have two different records of motherboards in 2011 and cannot find the exact motherboard in records of emails but the other motherboard I have record of is the DP55SG and now that I look at the pdf guide to that motherboard, the following may be the answer to my original question:

This is from the 1.7 Discrete SATA Controller section of the pdf:

The red eSATA connector on the back panel can be used to connect an eSATA drive. It can also be used for port replication, which allows the aggregation of multiple hard drives on the eSATA port. Figure 10 on page 42 shows the location of the External SATA -compatible SATA ports on the back panel. The Marvell 88E6145 controller uses the PCI Express bus for data transfer with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 3 Gb/s per port. These connectors are in addition to the six SATA connectors of the PCH SATA interface. To use the eSATA ports you must enable RAID support in the BIOS for the Marvell discrete controller. The two internal ports can stay in the default IDE mode if RAID is not required. The discrete SATA interface supports the following RAID levels: • RAID 0 • RAID

I do plan on doing a new motherboard and processor maybe this year or soon after that for a more current computer. This one is not the very best and it is very old now. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Take care.