SATA-ports disabled A-Z170X-Gaming 5

[eivrossum]

Just build my new PC on Saturday with a GA-Z170X-Gaming 5 motherboard (with i-6700K) and installed a Samsung 950PRO (M2SSD) on the slot M2D. Then tried to install my hard drives, but found out that SATA port 0-3 are disabled. So I moved the M2SSD to the other slot M2H. Now the manual is very unclear about what exactly gets disabled. According to what I found on internet only one PCI-express slot will be disbaled in when I install in M2H. But .. not in my case, because still the 4 SATA-slot were disabled in BIOS. I want to use all SATA port and the M2SSD port. Is this possible? And so yes, must I change something in the BIOS to make this possible? Who can help Thanks, Erik

[dmdilks]

You are looking at the Peripherals / SATA Configuration. My controller is set to Raid. I have mine next to the CPU. In there In the bios I have on mine 0 - TB HHD / 1- TB HHD / 2- DVD / 3- M2 drive 4- nothing & 5 - Blueray.

You can only run AHCI (default) or Raid. The controller should say enabled. Look in there and see which port your M2 drive is on.   

[eivrossum]

My controller is set to AHCI with all ports enabled. Still my hard drive are not recognized.

[dmdilks]

Is everything new? If it is can you test the drives in another computer. We just had somebody order a SSD & 3 HHD's from amazon and they were all dead.

[eivrossum]

Good news, because yesterday  I loaded  Optimized Defaults and from then my hard drives were recognised. And, yes, everything is brand new. I only have one questions. Somebody said to me that when I place my Samsung Pro950 SSD  in the M2H slot the s[eed will be downgraded fom x4 to 2x PCIe. I can not find this back when I google and in the manual. Does somebody know if this is true?

[shadowsports]

This is only true of the M2D_32G M.2 Connector when the controller operate mode is set to RAID.  See page 18 of the manual.  This is because there is only 1 PCIe lane dedicated to these connectors when 2 devices are present.  One device in AHCI mode yields full X4 speed.

[eivrossum]

Thanks, I thought already that the remark(note) at the bottom about this was only for a RAID configuration.