SATA is one of two primary interfaces through which you connect critical components to your PC (the other one being PCIe). It is used by storage drives including hard disk drives, optical CD/DVD drives, as well as SATA Solid State Drives. When you are new to building PC or adding a component, things can get …
Being perhaps the primary interface for connecting hard drives, it is hard to miss out on SATA ports on a motherboard. A SATA port is basically a small port measuring about 1.5 cm x 0.4 cm in dimensions with very specific notches and a highly recognizable L-shaped seven pin connector. The notches, edges and the …
If you have one CD ROM drive and one hard disk, then essentially you will need one SATA Data cable and one SATA Power cable. Basically, each drive requires a SATA data cable and a power cable to operate. The SATA cables are provided with the motherboard and the power cables are provided with the …
You can add more SATA ports to your motherboard using a device called a SATA Expansion Card (also known as SATA Port Multiplier). Essentially, it is a PCIe device that connects to a PCIe slot on your motherboard and may feature multiple SATA connectors for connecting your storage devices to. A modern motherboard has multiple …
The amount of SATA ports you need will depend on how many storage drives you plan to connect to your PC. Each drive connects to a single SATA port. Two SATA ports are generally quite sufficient for a basic build. However, If you need to connect more hard drives, you will need more SATA ports. …
Yes, to an extent, it does matter which SATA port you use. However, it also largely depends on the motherboard model and the SATA port version it features. For instance, if you have a recent motherboard model with all the ports being SATA 3, you can use any port to connect your SATA 3 drive. …
Basically, the actual number will depend on the board itself. An average motherboard has about 4-8 SATA ports. Things such as motherboard size and chipset matter here. Currently the number of SATA ports on motherboards ranges from 0 – 13. But again high number of SATA ports are only found in expensive and specialized boards …
A head-to-head speed comparison will indicate that PCIe is the obvious winner. With the current trending PCIe generation v4.0, you can get throughout rate (speed) of about 2 GB/s on an x1 slot and about 32 GB/s on an x16 slot. In comparison to this, the current SATA v3 only offers a max of only …