Asus m3n78 pro sata ports

[kajabbi]

Hi,

i just built a new system on the asus m3n78 pro motherboard. I have 3 sata drives (2 hdd's and a DVD/ RW)
and the motherboard has six sata ports (4 red 2 black) but due to a motherboard design flaw 2 of the red sata's are covered by my long ati 4870 graphics card. My problem is that only the red sata ports work and i have my 2 hdd's plugged into them which i am going to be running in RAID but i can't plug my DVD drive into the black ones because it doesn't recognise it. In the bios it has SATA's 1-4 listed but not 5 and six which are the black ones. I can't find any way to enable the or anything. What can i do? is there a way to enable them? I need all three sata drives plugged in before i can install windows :-(

thanks

 

[irishphoto]

i know this is an old post but i came across this problem installing a hard drive for a client. his 9800gtx covers up sata 3, and he already has 2 HDD and 1 DVD-RW drive taking up the rest of SATA 1-4.

on this board, SATA 5 and 6 are not made available in IDE controller mode, you have to be in RAID or AHCI modes to even use 5 or 6.

i think it's pretty absurd, if there were 6 usable ports in IDE and 7 and 8 were RAID or AHCI only, i could dig it. but only 4 usable ports, especially in a location where larger graphics cards are going to cover up, is pretty shortsided.

 

[kajabbi]

thanks

in the end I discovered another SATA cable in my motherboard box. This one is bent at the end so when plugged in it lies flat against the board and can fit under the graphics card. This allows me to use one of the covered ports, which is enough. I guess they included this cable when they realized their design flaw.