Search
Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H - will it support four drives?

Last response: in Motherboards
Share

Sorry for a possibly dumb question. I'm doing a new build and intend to use four drives, and am wondering if the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H will support all four?

Current version of the complete build is here:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/fqFN

I'll be using this for photoshopping, light HD video editing, and as a music workstation (DAW).

The proposed drives are:

Crucial M4 256GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - OS and programs

Two Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB hard drives - one for media source files, the other for renders, final projects and documents.

One WD Caviar Blue 250GB as a scratch disk / paging disk for photoshop and some video editing programs.


All four drives are SATA 6gb/s.

Here's where this might be a dumb question:

The mobo's storage specs say the "chipset" supports "up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices."

Then there's another storage spec for "2 x Marvell 88SE9172 chips" which says it supports "up to 3 SATA 6Gb/s devices" with another connector on the back panel "supporting up to 1 SATA 6Gb/s device."

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4...

So does this mother board support 2 SATA 6Gb/s drives, or 3, or 5, or 6??? I'm very confused after reading the specs.

I just want to know if I can put all four of those drives on this board. :??: 

More about : gigabyte z77x ud5h support drives

Register or log in to remove
Motherboard Expert

stupid pcpartpicker. giving shitty information as always.

But yes it can support 4 hard drives.

It has 4x Sata 3.0 gbps ports and 2x Sata 6.0 gbps ports.

So a total of 6 hard drives.

So the max you can do is 2 SSD (without limiting performance since a lot of SSDs go over 3.0gbps data transfer speed) and 4 HDDs...
Related ressources
Ask the community
Motherboard Expert

slejhamer said:
Thanks. So if I need a total of 4x SATA 6 gb/s ports, I guess I need a different board.


Why? your HDDs will never ever exceed the 3.0Gbps limit of the 3gb/s port. (hell... most don't even exceed the 1.5 Gbps limit on even older ports...)

I'm not understanding your question ... or maybe you're not understanding mine?

I want to plug four 6gb/s drives into four 6gb/s ports, not into 3gb/s ports.

Also, after further review of the actual board layout, this Gigabyte board does have 5 of them - 2x intel 6gb/s ports and 3x marvell 6gb/s ports (the ones they are calling "gsata",) plus several 3gb/s ports.
Motherboard Expert

slejhamer said:
I'm not understanding your question ... or maybe you're not understanding mine?

I want to plug four 6gb/s drives into four 6gb/s ports, not into 3gb/s ports.

Also, after further review of the actual board layout, this Gigabyte board does have 5 of them - 2x intel 6gb/s ports and 3x marvell 6gb/s ports (the ones they are calling "gsata",) plus several 3gb/s ports.


so you're putting 4 SSDs in it?

If not, then it doesn't matter if the HDD says 3 Gbps or 6Gbps or 1.5 Gbps because they'll all perform the same on each connection.
Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

killerhurtalot said:
so you're putting 4 SSDs in it?

If not, then it doesn't matter if the HDD says 3 Gbps or 6Gbps or 1.5 Gbps because they'll all perform the same on each connection.

+1

OP:
the only disk you are using that will take advantage of the different in bandwidth between sata6 and sata3 is the SSD.

and yes a sata6 disk will work perfectly fine in a sata3 port.

Really? Why would a HDD drive spec'd at 6gb/s not give better performance when plugged into a 6gb/s port? Sorry if I'm sounding a bit daft; very new to all this.

Well anyway, I ended up with an ASRock Extreme board, which has four of each SATA port (II and III) so I'm covered in either situation. Nice deal at Microcenter when purchased with the i7 chip. :) 
Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

it is the mechanical limitations of a hard disk the heads can only move so fast and read/write so much data.

a little more research on your part will have you comprehending completely.

hey look at graphics cards; they don't exceed the bandwidth of PCI 2.0 but now there is PCI 3.0 (which doubles it) better to have and not need than need and not have . .
Anonymous
Motherboard Authority

don't feel bad. when i switch from sataII to sataIII on both motherboard and hard drives i was all excited to see a bit of increase in benchmarking. turns out i was fooled by the differences in the cache in the disk (8mb of a WD blue vs 64mb WD black).
Register or log in to remove
 
Ask the community
Read discussions in other Motherboards categories
!