SAS Port vs SATA SSD

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daniel_542

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Jun 10, 2017
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Hi all,
Can I connect a SATA III SSD to a SAS port on my ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard? I can't seem to find a direct answer to this question anywhere.
If it is possible, do I need a specific type of connector cable/adapter to make it work?
The only reason I ask is that I have 7 SATA devices but only 6 intel ports on the board and I really don't want to bottleneck a device by using a PCI-E SATA card (unless I really have to).
My theory is that I have my 2 SSDs (boot drives) linked to the SAS ports 1/2 then have my 4 7200RPM HDDs on the intel ports (they are a RAID 5 volume) and use on of the remaining intel ports for the DVD-RW drive.

Can someone advise on this? I have tried turning the marvell SATA ports on to compatibility mode with boot ROM enabled and the intel ports on all 3 modes (IDE, RAID and AHCI) but the marvell BIOS screen reports no drives found so I am assuming that either the marvell controller doesn't support SATA drives correctly or I need a certain type of cable to connect SATA drives up.

HELP!!! lol
 
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It should work in theory (and you shouldn't need any special cables) and I've found reports of people using SATA hard disks on the same controller chip on similar motherboards (here, for example) but the 88SE6320 SAS controller only has a single PCIe 2.0 lane so it will be a bottleneck if both SSDs are active simultaneously. (This wouldn't be a problem for hard disks, of course, but SSDs can saturate the link easily.)

Your best bet might be to have a small add-in card for the DVD-RW drive (even a cheap one should be fine as it won't be pushing the link capacity anywhere near its limits) and keep the SSDs on the Intel SATA controller. (It might be worth seeing if the SAS controller recognises the DVD drive, I suppose.)
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molletts

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Jun 16, 2009
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It should work in theory (and you shouldn't need any special cables) and I've found reports of people using SATA hard disks on the same controller chip on similar motherboards (here, for example) but the 88SE6320 SAS controller only has a single PCIe 2.0 lane so it will be a bottleneck if both SSDs are active simultaneously. (This wouldn't be a problem for hard disks, of course, but SSDs can saturate the link easily.)

Your best bet might be to have a small add-in card for the DVD-RW drive (even a cheap one should be fine as it won't be pushing the link capacity anywhere near its limits) and keep the SSDs on the Intel SATA controller. (It might be worth seeing if the SAS controller recognises the DVD drive, I suppose.)
 
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daniel_542

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Jun 10, 2017
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I decided before I saw your post to use my SATA controller card for the DVD-RW drive and all is awesome now!

 
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