SSD + HDD Sata Port Question

xxredxsparowexx

Commendable
Jul 31, 2016
4
0
1,510
Hi! First time poster on the forums here looking to get a little bit of advice.

Recently I upgraded my desktop with an SSD along with installing Windows on it as my primary boot drive. The preinstalled HDD was then formatted after saving my files and I now use it as an archive drive (holds all my pictures, videos, music, photoshop library, 3DS Max libraries, stuff like that) keeping my SSD nice and clean with only Windows and the base programs themselves.

Changed my settings in each of these programs so that they all know by default to save, load, import and export from my secondary drive, again keeping the SSD clean as possible. It's only a 240GB SSD and I can't really afford a bigger one at the moment.

Anyways let me get to my point. When I did the upgrade I simply took one of the extra sata cables that came with my desktop, thankfully ASUS supplied it with purchased for the purpose of upgrading in the future. I then plugged the SSD into the next open SATA port on the motherboard and proceeded to boot up windows. Everything worked great! The cloning software did it's job and I had no problems setting the new SSD as the boot drive to boot windows.

Well next time I logged into the BIOS to check some other settings I noticed it wasn't being displayed. Only the stock HDD was displayed. I didn't think anything of it at first because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?" right?

Well today I was opening up my desktop to prepare for a GPU upgrade and I realized something that I should've realized when installing the new SSD in the first place, even after I had changed the drive letters in windows so that the SSD was now my "C" drive and my HDD was my "D" drive, I never thought to actually swap the SATA connections on the motherboard for the drives!

My SSD is in Slot 1 setup as the "C drive" with Windows

My HDD is in Slot 0 setup as the "D drive" for file storage

Now I've had no problems running my system like this, but could this be why my SSD doesn't show up in the BIOS menu? It shows up once I'm logged into windows under drive management, lets me partition it, if need be, etc.

Basically what I'm wondering is while I have my desktop opened up during the new GPU install, what would happen if I simply swapped my SSD over into slot 0 and in turn swapped my HDD into slot 1, as they technically should be right?

Am I going to have problems booting into windows next time or using programs?

And if that's the case, if I wanted to actually do this SATA port swap, am I going to have to wind up reinstalling windows and all my programs from scratch afterwards?

I know internal drives don't really function in the way external drives do, where as and external can be plugged into any of the USB ports without a problem.

Sorry for the long post and if I'm not making any sense, again I'm sorry. I'm going on 2 days no sleep, I suffer from insomnia. So while I won't actually be doing the swap tonight I'd like to at least get everything in order for when I do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.
 
Solution
It generally doesn't matter which SATA port either one of the drives is plugged into. There are so many things that could be the reason for your SSD not displaying in the BIOS.