Which SATA port do I plug in my HDD and optical drive?

[CitricThunder]

I have an ASRock Z77 Extreme3 and there is 4 SATA2 ports and 2 SATA3 ports. Which one do I plug my HDD and optical drive into? I read the user manual and it didn't really give much info on what goes where, just what each port is capable of. I'm just really confused on this and if somebody could clear this up, that would be great.

 

[BadPeteNo]

In short, any port will work for either device.

Unless you have some kind of super fancy hard drive or a solid state drive, you won't really notice the difference. I'd say put them in the SATA3 ports anyway though. Mechanical drives can never hope to bring out SATA3's potential because they have moving parts. Even more so with optical drives that are even slower.

If you you have multiple hard drives, bios will automatically boot of the hard drive in the lowest numbered port unless you tell it otherwise, so I tend to put the drive with my OS in the first port.

I'd say just plug them in your two SATA3 ports. If you get another hard drive in the future, bump the optical down to one of the SATA2 ports.