Question: mSATA and number of HDDs

[Carson Dyle]

On a motherboard with a mini-PCIe port that supports mSATA SSDs, if an mSATA SSD is installed, can all HDD headers be used? For instance on a motherboard with the Z77 chipset, which offers two 6Gbit/s SATA ports and four 3 Gbit/s SATA ports, could you have an mSATA drive plus six additional SATA drives?

 

[razel]

That answer maybe best answered by the motherboard manufacturer. However if you are keen on chipsets and southbridges you could try to investigate it yourself. Find out, through the device connections in 'Device manager' if that mSATA is running off the SATA controller or it's own PCI-E link. If it's off the SATA controller then find out what is the max SATA devices it can handle and obviously subtract one. If it's off it's own PCI-E link, which is similar to plugging a mSATA board onto the PCI-e slot, then it's in addition.

Like I mentioned though, that's all theory, it's probably best to ask the manufacturer. Best of luck.

 

[greenhawk]

depends on the board. generally from when I was looking recently, the options range from the msata being dedicated or shared with a normal sata port. Just like some boards have esata dedicated to a chipset sata port and others have it share.

in all the shared options, only one of the connectors can be used.

 

[Carson Dyle]

depends on the board. generally from when I was looking recently, the options range from the msata being dedicated or shared with a normal sata port. Just like some boards have esata dedicated to a chipset sata port and others have it share.

in all the shared options, only one of the connectors can be used.

If the chipset were capable of controlling exactly 6 SATA devices and there are 6 SATA headers, then wouldn't it _have_ to share a port?

Or ... do any of the new Intel chipsets have the ability to address an additional PCIe SATA device?

I'll have to look through a motherboard manual or two...

 

[greenhawk]

Or ... do any of the new Intel chipsets have the ability to address an additional PCIe SATA device?

they have always had this ability. IIRC one Asrock board I remember had enough addon sata controllers installed it could connect 12 sata devices. It was a odd SB-E board though, but it is possible to make without requireing the end user to buy extra sata controllers.

 

[Hellhammer]

There are three possible options that I can think of:

1. The mSATA port is routed directly to the PCH, meaning that your available configurations are mSATA + 5 SATA ports or just 6 SATA ports.

2. The mSATA port (or some of the SATA headers) is routed to a third party PCIe SATA controller, which means you can use mSATA + 6 SATA ports simultaneously.

3. The mSATA port is routed to a SATA port multiplier, which means it's shared with another SATA port(s). You can use mSATA + 6 SATA ports simultaneously, but the bandwidth would be shared by at least two devices.

The first one is the most likely because it doesn't involve any extra chips and hence it's the cheapest.