ASRock X670E PRO RS Limited to 4 SATA Ports

I have a ASRock X670E PRO RS and I am unable to install more than 4 SATA drives (3 SATA hard drives plus a DVD writer). I have a Kingston FURY Renegade M.2 2280 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 3D TLC SSD in the ?œBlazing??M.2 slot which is the boot drive to Windows 11. The rest of my system is:

G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5 5600 F5-5600J2834F32GX2-RS5W (2, total of 128GB)
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X - 12-Core 4.7 GHz
Seagate IronWolf 14TB Hard Drive ST14000VN0008
Seagate BarraCuda ST8000DM004 8TB
Seagate IronWolf 6TB ST6000VN001
LG MoDISK BD Rewriter

When I have the above items plugged in, everything works fine. I?™ve not tried to run any setting above ?œdefault??in the BIOS. When I try to add a 4th SATA drive (usually one of my 4 TB drives), things get weird. Usually, the 4th spinning drive just won?™t show up in Windows 11 or when I?™m in the BIOS. Now if I disconnect one of the other spinning drives (that were already in the system), usually the 4th (new) drive shows up in place of the removed drive, but not always. Things get inconsistent once I start messing with a 4th SATA drive. Note, this happens even if the 4th drive is an SSD SATA drive.

Any idea why I can?™t seem to add a 4th drive? I do have lots of memory installed (Matlab, which I use A LOT, really appreciates lots of memory). I?™m at a loss as once that 4th drive is part of the equation, odd, non-repeatable things happen (in other words, I can get two different outcomes with the same hardware plugged in).

The bottom line is I can only have a consistent, stable system with the Kingston SSD in the ?œBlazing??M.2 slot, the BD drive in the first SATA slot, and the other 3 spinning SATA drives in 3 of the other SATA slots (doesn?™t seem to matter WHICH slots the other drives are attached to).

Looking at the manual, it looks like the first 4 SATA ports are from the first chipset, and the 2 more SATA ports are from the second chipset. But as you wrote, which port you use isn't making a difference, so it seems unlikely to be a hardware defect. Maybe BIOS bug?

Since optical drives are slightly different from HDDs, I'd try to put all the HDDs on the first four ports, and put the optical drive on one of the last two port. It's perfectly fine to leave any number of port(s) in the middle unused.

I don't have any other ideas, other than contacting customer service. It should be easy enough for them to TRY to recreate your configuration in their labs.

eccential wrote: ...Maybe BIOS bug?

I hope not, as that would not be a quick fix.

Since optical drives are slightly different from HDDs, I'd try to put all the HDDs on the first four ports, and put the optical drive on one of the last two port. It's perfectly fine to leave any number of port(s) in the middle unused.

I'll try that one. I put the BD drive on the FIRST port, I never tried it on the LAST port.

I don't have any other ideas, other than contacting customer service. It should be easy enough for them to TRY to recreate your configuration in their labs.

I'll try that after moving the BD drive around.

Thanks for the reply!

I considered power supply not being enough when I originally saw this thread, but that seems incredibly unlikely, because you wrote that even a 4th SATA SSD didn't work. SATA SSDs consume very little power, and none at all from 12V rail.

Amount of RAM is of little consequence to power supply because they don't consume that much power.

Oh, one more idea. Have you tried different SATA cable(s)? It's fairly rare, but I've encountered bad SATA cables before. And if you have additional SATA power connectors from the power supply, try different plugs, also.

have you tried changing Launch Storage OpROM Policy in the boot menu ?