Yes.
Some drives have a jumper on them you have to close that allows the drive to present the proper SATA version to the BIOS, other times it is simply automatic.
If I understand your question correctly, I believe the answer is "no". Each sata drive is independently connected to controllers on (or connected to PCi or PCIe bus) the motherboard. A controller knows how many sata drives are connected to it, and software running on the CPU can determine the total number of sata drives connected.