Which S-ATA Ports

Your primary boot drive must *ALWAYS* be plugged into SATA-0 as that's where the motherboard will look for the disc that contains the active operating system. Then after that plug your second and/or third HDs into SATA-1 and SATA-2, your optical drive(s) into SATA-3 and SATA-4.

What is "SATA-0" where's that? and "SATA-4" definitely doesn't exist... r you sure you know what your talking about? cause i swear you can select boot order in the bios, so it basically doesn't matter where you plug it.

Here's an example of what the SATA ports on a modern Gigabyte board look like:



On most motherboards the port that's labeled SATA-0 is usually in the upper right-hand corner, occasionally it will be the upper left-hand corner. Consult your manual for better details.

But SATA-0 is the first port in a set of connectors, and that's the one that the BIOS will use to look for the disc containing the active OS.

It's easier if you plug your boot drive into SATA0 because the system looks from lowest to highest by default, but I definitely don't think it *HAS* to be. You can change the boot priority in the BIOS to whatever you want. Otherwise, if it was really *REQUIRED* that the main drive with the OS be on SATA0, when you installed Windows the first time from a disc, you'd have to manually plug the CD drive into SATA0, then after it was installed, unplug it and plug the primary hard drive into SATA0.

I mean, it's probably best practice to put your main drive on SATA0, for the simple reason that your machine will still boot if the BIOS is ever wiped clean (if the CMOS battery on your motherboard dies, for example). But I've seen machines with all kinds of configurations - nothing on SATA0, DVD drive on SATA0, main drive on SATA1, SATA4, SATA5, whatever, and they've still worked.

The main thing is just to make sure the SSD is plugged into a 6GB SATA port. And ignore the third-party SATA ports unless you have multiple SSDs or you're planning on setting up a separate RAID array. Otherwise I've actually heard it documented that plugging in drives from the same system across two separate controllers can actually slow down your machine - not a ton, but still there.

I know it doesn't really matter, I've always been taught that the SATA-0 is the fail-safe for the boot drive and that's the way it works best - when I build new systems I always try to use SATA-0 as the boot drive by default so that I don't get anything else confused. I plug the secondary storage into the consecutive ports, and then the optical drive(s) on the last ports.

I rarely use up all my SATA ports - even on both the systems I'm using now I run 1 SSD and 2 HDs and 2 opticals on one, plus my flash card reader but that's hooked up to USB. On the other I have 2 optical drives (1 BD-R, 1-DVD) and 2 HDs (1 SSD and 1HD).

SSD should be plugged on SATA 111 6GB/s(where you install the OS), then the rest is anywhere. But if your HDD is SATA 111(6GB/s) also you should plugged it on SATA 111(6 GB/s)

Yeah, I agree that's definitely the best practice if you're able and you want to keep things neat and tidy. There have been a number of times when I've decided against using SATA0 just because something was half-blocking it, or it was a tough stretch to make a cable reach. It definitely cuts down on the potential for confusion, or for plugging things back together in the incorrect places, or for having to follow cables back to the drive. Depends on how often you root around inside the case, I suppose.

I've never come close to using up all the SATA ports either, except back when some boards only had 4. I doubt that'll be much of a problem going forward.

Ok so it seems that every S-ATA port is numbered from 0- whatever, but what i meant to ask was does my optical drive need S-ATA 6GBs? or will it just be overkill? and the same two questions for my HDD. And ok ill plug my SSD on S-ATA 0(gonna have to look at the manual to see which one it is) but only if its a
S-ATA 6GBs.

Im quite sure HDDs don't get to the speed of S-ATA 6GBS, so that i'll be plugging into a S-ATA 3GBs port, but the optical drive is the main question

No optical drive that I have ever heard of would come close to needing 6GB/s. By far the slowest part of transferring data from an optical drive is reading the data from the disc itself. So that is going to be your limiting factor, not the connection speed.

Basically, optical drives read slower than mechanical hard drives, and even the best mechanical hard drive won't saturate a 3GB/s connection, so you're good.