SATA 1-SATA 4 disappears whenever I use PCIE3

It's in your board's spec sheet on it's product page. PCIe3 shares lanes with SATA.
When you populate the PCIe3 slot it disables 4 SATA ports. This is because the CPU
and chipset have a limited number of PCIe lanes to split between all the IO on your
board. This is why HEDT platforms exist, they have a much higher number of PCIe
lanes and thus can accommodate more PCIe based devices. It's one of the reasons
I still haven't upgraded my Threadripper 2950x system, I have 64 PCIe lanes vs
just 20 from intel's 14th gen CPUs.

ASRock is pretty good with providing connectivity options, allowing you to maximize
your PCIe lane usage but there are limits to consumer grade systems.

If you have not populated all your SATA ports try swapping the drives that are
on disabled ports to other ones until you get it all working.

I hope this helps.

Xaltar wrote: It's in your board's spec sheet on it's product page. PCIe3 shares lanes with SATA. When you populate the PCIe3 slot it disables 4 SATA ports. This is because the CPU and chipset have a limited number of PCIe lanes to split between all the IO on your board. This is why HEDT platforms exist, they have a much higher number of PCIe lanes and thus can accommodate more PCIe based devices. It's one of the reasons I still haven't upgraded my Threadripper 2950x system, I have 64 PCIe lanes vs just 20 from intel's 14th gen CPUs. ASRock is pretty good with providing connectivity options, allowing you to maximize your PCIe lane usage but there are limits to consumer grade systems. If you have not populated all your SATA ports try swapping the drives that are on disabled ports to other ones until you get it all working. I hope this helps.

I think I got the info here:

*Supports Intel® Volume Management Device (VMD)
Supports NVMe SSD as boot disks
If M2_1 is occupied, PCIE1 will downgrade to x8 mode.
If PCIE2 is occupied, M2_1 will be disabled.
M2_1 and M2_2 cannot be populated simultaneously.

**If PCIE3 is occupied, SATA3_0~3 will be disabled.""

Is this my case?

So I got to make sure my M2 does not occupy M2_1 slot so as to use PCI-E 2?

Xaltar wrote: That is correct, yes. It can be a bit of a juggling game but ASRock allows quite a bit of flexibility and options to extract the most out of your available lanes. Good luck

Once again, I'd love to thank you.
This is something what I suspected so far but I lack the kind of knowledge in this area. Hardware these days have changed so fast that I think I start to miss some knowledge regarding its limitations and know-hows