[SOLVED] Want to add a 3rd storage drive on ASUS Prime B450M-A; Unsure how

[Scionwest]

As the title says, I have an ASUS PRIME B450M-A that came with my Ryzen 3700X CyberPower PC. It currently has the M.2 slot filled with a 1TB SSD and I plugged an 8TB HDD into one of the power cables that they had stuffed into the side of the case and put the drive into one of the SATA slots on the motherboard and it's worked well.

I want to buy a 3rd drive, a 2nd SSD but this time a 2.5" since I don't have any M.2 slots available. I'm not a PC builder so I don't fully understand all of the specs. When I read them it mentions 2 x SATA and 4 x SATA. I assume I can buy another drive and plug a SATA cable into an empty slot on the motherboard and be good... is that not the case?

I'm also unsure on power. There is a lot of power cables stuffed in the case out of the power supply. Does it mater which one I use or will any work?

Thanks for helping!

 

[Lutfij]

All you need to do is plug the 2.5" SSD to an available SATA port, you might need an additional SATA 6Gbps cable and an available SATA power plug from the PSU. Once you boot into the OS' GUI, you need to go into Disk Manager and see if the drive needs initializing.

So long as you conform to the ports on the motherboard, PSU and the SATA SSD, you're good to go, i.e you can force fit a molex power connector onto a SATA power plug.

SATA port 5 and 6 will be disabled since you have an M.2 SSD in the M.2 slot.