What to plug my hard drive and ssd in?

AdriaanC

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Aug 20, 2015
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I have an ssd and a hard drive that i want to plug in.
My motherboard has a light blue (3GBs/sec) SATA.

A greyish 6GB/sec sata.
and a darker blue 6GB/sec sata.

It is an intel board. What would i plug these in to? (normal hdd and ssd)
 
Solution
Hey there, AdriaanC!

The (3Gb/s) SATA ports are SATA II and respectively the 6Gb/s are SATA III.
You need to plug your SSD in the first available SATA III (6 Gb/s) port (preferably one of the grey ports, you wouldn't need the dark blue for now).
If the HDD is SATA III (6 Gb/s) as well, then you can plug it next to the SSD (after you've installed the OS on the SSD). Don't have both storage devices plugged to the motherboard until you've finished the installation of Windows on the primary drive (otherwise you'd encounter an OS confusion).
Either way, for the mechanical HDDs it doesn't make much of a difference whether it's SATA II or SATA III, because they are limited in their throughput by platter density and RPMs which prevent them...
Hey there, AdriaanC!

The (3Gb/s) SATA ports are SATA II and respectively the 6Gb/s are SATA III.
You need to plug your SSD in the first available SATA III (6 Gb/s) port (preferably one of the grey ports, you wouldn't need the dark blue for now).
If the HDD is SATA III (6 Gb/s) as well, then you can plug it next to the SSD (after you've installed the OS on the SSD). Don't have both storage devices plugged to the motherboard until you've finished the installation of Windows on the primary drive (otherwise you'd encounter an OS confusion).
Either way, for the mechanical HDDs it doesn't make much of a difference whether it's SATA II or SATA III, because they are limited in their throughput by platter density and RPMs which prevent them from exceeding SATA II bandwidth (3 Gb/s = max 300 MB/s).

Hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have more questions! :)
SuperSoph_WD
 
Solution