[SOLVED] SATA Express and SATA III - How many devices?

Feb 19, 2019
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The motherboard in question is an MSI Z170A PC Mate.

My question is, can you plug an SSD into the SATA Express port on the mobo, and then use all six remaining SATA III ports on devices (mainly hard drives). Or does using the SATA Express port limit the number of SATA III ports you can use?
 
Solution
Thanks for the help everyone.

Reading the manual, it seems that use of the M.2 slots effectively disables a SATA port.

But would using a PCI-E adapter card for an SSD disable a SATA port? I don't see anything about it in the manual . . .

If you use a PCIe slot it should not disable any SATA ports unless the slot you are using is explicitly tied to the same link. I doubt they are as most boards tied M.2 into the same SATA link and the PCIe slots were separate.
cable.jpg


Thats the SATAe cable. If you use a SATAe drive then the two SATA ports there get used and you can only use the remaining SATA ports as SATAe uses ports 1 and 2 for its connection.

So to make it easy, if you use SATAe you would have the SATAe drive and 4 open SATA ports for drives.
 
Feb 19, 2019
3
0
10
Thanks for the help everyone.

Reading the manual, it seems that use of the M.2 slots effectively disables a SATA port.

But would using a PCI-E adapter card for an SSD disable a SATA port? I don't see anything about it in the manual . . .
 
Thanks for the help everyone.

Reading the manual, it seems that use of the M.2 slots effectively disables a SATA port.

But would using a PCI-E adapter card for an SSD disable a SATA port? I don't see anything about it in the manual . . .

If you use a PCIe slot it should not disable any SATA ports unless the slot you are using is explicitly tied to the same link. I doubt they are as most boards tied M.2 into the same SATA link and the PCIe slots were separate.
 
Solution