Asrock X99X Killer - SATA Ports
Printed From: ASRock.com
Category: Technical Support
Forum Name: Intel Motherboards
Forum Description: Question about ASRock Intel Motherboards
URL: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=456
Printed Date: 30 Jul 2025 at 1:45pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Asrock X99X Killer - SATA Ports
Posted By: DevillEars
Subject: Asrock X99X Killer - SATA Ports
Date Posted: 22 Jul 2015 at 7:09pm
|
This board has two "groups" of SATA ports: 1) 6-ports labelled SATA_0 to SATA_5 2) 4-ports labelled S_SATA_0 to S_SATA_3 Questions: a) To which group should I install an SSD as a system/OS drive? b) Do the two groups have different bandwidth per port? c) If yes, what are these bandwidths per port for each group? SSD is currently attached to one of the S_SATA ports and running very slowly (~80MB/sec). Other HDDs (Seagate ST3000DM001) also attached to same group and not showing any signs of decent throughput either. Query: Any tips/hints on how to maximise I/O bandwidth achieved across SATA? Dave ------------- If music be the love of food, eat on |
Replies:
Posted By: odiebugs
Date Posted: 22 Jul 2015 at 8:08pm
|
I have to go, but just to help quick in case someone does not come along for the rest of info. The 6 Sata3 are the Intel ports, and windows needs to be on the Sata3- 0 and not on the S Sata. Yes, they have different bandwidth, the Intel ports are the fastest. Have a good day. ------------- asrocking |
Posted By: DevillEars
Date Posted: 22 Jul 2015 at 11:18pm
|
Thanks mate, I was reasonably sure that one of those groups was connected direct to the chipset and the other was fed through some third-party SATA controller (similar to various Z97 implementations), but could not find any definitive statements in the manual as to which was which. All the best. Dave ------------- If music be the love of food, eat on |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 23 Jul 2015 at 2:48pm
X99 boards like yours have two SATA controllers, but BOTH are provided by the Intel X99 chipset. ALL of those ports are SATA III, 6Gb/s. Your board does not have an add on SATA controller like the ASMedia or Marvell. There is one difference between the two sets of ports. The six ports labelled SATA_0 to SATA_5 support RAID and can be used in RAID mode with the Intel IRST driver. These six ports can be used in RAID, AHCI, or IDE mode. The four ports labelled S_SATA_0 to S_SATA_3 do not support RAID, and can be used in AHCI or IDE mode only. I don't know if the following is Intel terminology, but the 'S' in the name of those ports could be "Secondary", but only because they do not support RAID. I just got an X99 board myself, so I'll be testing all the ports. But they really all should be the same bandwidth, SATA III 6Gb/s. Try your SSD on the SATA_0 port. You do NOT need to be in RAID mode to use those ports, they are simply capable of supporting RAID. Questions regarding your situation: What SATA mode are you set to in the BIOS/UEFI? The default is AHCI, and there is NO reason to use IDE, which has the worst performance. If you are using IDE mode now, you can't just change to AHCI, you'll need to do a registry edit to do that. What are you using to measure the speed of the drives, where you see ~80MB/s? What SSD are you using? Are all your drives directly connected to the SATA ports? This is a benchmark I just ran on my X99 board, with a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD on the SATA_0 port. I use RAID mode on those ports, but this is a single SSD, no RAID array, and RAID mode does not make the ports faster.  This SSD is the OS drive on this PC, so won't get the highest speeds possible since it is serving the PC. I've had slightly better results on other mother boards, but only in the 4K results. I don't have this PC optimized yet for SSD benchmarking. Otherwise the results here are fine and what I would expect to see. All drives do not perform at the same speed all the time, the size of the files and number of files they are dealing with makes a big difference. The speed you see in the Seq row means sequential, and refers to large files of 500KB and larger. Large file are the easiest to read and write quickly, which we see in the ~500MB/s read and write speeds. The 4K row means small, 4KB files. Notice the speed, ~30MB/s. The file is so small the main thing that takes time is locating it and all the overhead from the Windows file system. The 4K-64Thrd row is a test of 64 separate small (4K) file read and write requests sent to the SSD from the PC's memory via AHCI's Native Command Queuing (NCQ) feature. Notice that reading a total of 256KB (64 x 4K) can only be done at ~360MB/s total because of the overhead of locating each file and dealing with the file system. Using IDE mode with no NCQ (only available in AHCI and RAID mode) would be much slower still. Comparing a HDD to this SSD is unbelievable, they are so slow. This is the same benchmark on another PC of a so called "SATA III" HDD, which in reality does not exist. This is using RAID mode, which for single drives as in the SSD above, really is AHCI mode.  |
DevillEars wrote:Posted By: odiebugs
Date Posted: 23 Jul 2015 at 9:15pm
Very sorry, one of the mods has it posted as a ASmedia controller for the first four S Sata, but not his fault as I though the same thing, the manual doesn't say how the new chipset has added the four ports. Up until the X99 intel only provided 6 Sata 3, now they provide 10, but funny how only the 6 can run RAID. As to why the S Sata, which is a Intel controller is slow, I have no clue, I can't even see the UEFI pages on the manual, as the publisher who made it shouldn't even be making hot dog package covers. There are Storage configurations missing from the manual, such as AHCI, RAID. The manual would post what Sata to use for the OS, it no longer does. Again sorry to say this, but I don't know why there's a speed problem, but you really should bench two of the S Sata and the Sata3 -0 port to see if you get any slow speeds, you don't want the OS on a Sata 3 port that is slower then the other ones. Remember, a bench is actually of the SSD, but will show a difference if the ports have lower or higher bandwidth up to the SSD's max speed. ------------- asrocking |
Posted By: DevillEars
Date Posted: 23 Jul 2015 at 10:26pm
|
Hi Odie, Those kind folks who did the build on this PC are going to re-route the SATA connections for me on Monday. The planned drive population (with planned port allocations) is as follows: a) System Drive (Samsung 850PRO 512GB) - Port SATA_0 b) Data Drive 1 (Seagate Enterprise 6TB) - Port SATA_1 c) Data Drive 2 (Seagate Enterprise 6TB) - Port SATA_2 d) Data Drive 3 (Seagate Enterprise 6TB) - Port SATA_3 e) Data Drive 4 (Western Digital Green 6TB) - Port SATA_4 f) Data Drive 5 (Western Digital Green 6TB) - Port SATA_5 g) Data Drive 6 (Western Digital Green 6TB) - Port S_SATA_0 h) Data Drive 7 (Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB) - Port S_SATA_1 i) Data Drive 8 (Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB) - Port S_SATA_2 j) Data Drive 6 (Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB) - Port S_SATA_3 As a temporary "stopgap" the optical drives will be connected as follows: k) DVD R/W Drive (Asus) - Port Sunix/Marvell Controller slot 0 l) BD R/W Drive (LG) - Port Sunix/Marvell Controller slot 1 Longer term, my plan is to ditch the Sunix/Marvel 1x SATA card in favour of an Intel 8x 8-port PCIe 3.0 controller card and then re-think the port allocations. Answers to your questions: SATA Mode has been set to "AHCI" The I/O bandwidth determination was done using TeraCopy to copy 10 x 5TB files from drive to drive after a subjective assessment that copies were taking more than twice as long as they do on my older system (Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional) where on SATA-to-SATA copying from/to Seagate Enterprise drives I was hitting >200 MB/sec and even on USB 3.0 (Sandisk Extreme) to Seagate Enterprise I was seeing 180+ MB/sec copy rates. Copying a similar set of files from one ST3000DM001 to another saw TeraCopy return a copy rate of ~80 MB/sec (or ~50% of what I get on the older system). SSD in use is a 512GB Samsung 850PRO All drive SATA connections are from the motherboard ports to their corresponding hotswap bay connectors with drives set to "Internal" (i.e. not swappable). (Older system wired the same way) From your follow-up post, the fact that Intel have separated the SATA ports into two groups via the implementation on the X99 chipset may just be a RAID limitation which has been used to segregate the sinful SATA ports into two "logical" groupings - one, RAID-capable comprising 6 ports; the other Non-RAID comprising 4 ports. If this is the case, then all 10 ports should offer similar individual bandwidth. Should empirical tests show major bandwidth differences between the two groups, then maybe - somewhere between Intel and Asrock - a secondary SATA controller has been implemented via some form of PCIe switch (like PLX's PEX range) to eke "virtual bandwidth" from the available lanes. I have to agree that the supplied motherboard manual leaves much to be desired in terms of both content (inadequate and missing coverage) and quality of reproduction (UEFI pages virtually illegible). But, then again, that's what forums such as these are for...  These grey areas are what has led to considering the installation of an Intel 8x 8-port PCIe 3.0 controller (1 x PCIe 3.0 lane per drive sounds like a much better solution). Then I'll ignore the S_SATA ports completely and just use the X99's 6 x SATA ports plus the 8 ports on the Intel controller. A bit costly, but the right solution usually is initially more but less over time... Given the 28 lane limitation of the Core i7-5820K, my only concern is whether adding the Intel card would compromise GPU performance (I can't determine how many "lanes" are allocated to DMI between CPU and X99 - if any - or whether all 28 lanes are available for any PCIe 3.0 devices, while all PCIe 2.0 devices will connect via X99). Things were a lot simpler back in 1969 when I first got into IT...  Thanks again for your feedback - much appreciated. Dave ------------- If music be the love of food, eat on |
Posted By: odiebugs
Date Posted: 23 Jul 2015 at 11:01pm
|
Wow Dave, that is a setup. You better not be storing all of our Social Security cards, LOL  We know that RAID 0 has the six limitation but still can't find out why the limit extends to the S Sata. Don't forget to do a bench on the OS drive when done, you are only benching the large file part and you want to see what the drive looks like with all the other factors like small and latency. Try Anvil's storage utility, then just search for some benches on the same SSD you have to get an overview of what your performance is. Thanks for such a great reply, and lets hope your happy with the setup and gives you top performance. ------------- asrocking |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 24 Jul 2015 at 12:57am
|
DevillEars, thanks for answering my questions. Just saying, you may have me confused with odiebugs... You have two SATA mode settings on X99, both should be AHCI by default. I'll be checking the performance of the SSATA ports later today, as I am curious about the apparent performance difference when using the SSATA ports. I'll be using a SSD for that testing. Your HDDs that are not enterprise level drives, particularly the Green drives, will not perform at the level of your enterprise drives. Also, HDD performance decreases as they are filled with data, and kept de-fragmented. The inner cylinders will always be slower than the outer cylinders. If you copy between high performance and lower performance drives, particularly if the drives doing the writing are the lower performance drives, they will limit the transfer speed. Another point I tried to make earlier, is that there are exactly ZERO HDDs that can perform at SATA III speeds. The absolute best 10,000 RPM HDDs cannot reach the maximum real world speed of SATA II, which is ~260MB/s. That of course is only with large files. When Intel first provided SATA III on all six of the SATA ports in their 8 series chipsets (Z87, etc) we were able to try three - six SSDs in RAID 0 arrays. That is when we first saw the bandwidth limitations when most or all of the SATA III ports were in use. That was about 2.5GB/s for sequential, large files. |
Posted By: odiebugs
Date Posted: 24 Jul 2015 at 1:45am
|
I wonder if Devil will RAID five of the drives, in a 2 or three drive config, as this will make them a lot faster than there Sata 1 speed. Especially the 3 drive config.
------------- asrocking |
Posted By: DevillEars
Date Posted: 24 Jul 2015 at 2:18am
|
I'm not planning on implementing RAID in any form on any of my PC platforms - just on a NAS with a rather niche application. What I suspect is the problem is that the Core i7-5xxxK CPUs and the X99 chipset still retain some of the limitations of their predecessors with regards to SATA port support (total SATA bandwidth) and that the six-port reference in Intel's Feature/Benefit analysis supports this. The kludge to add four more ports has been achieved via an on-die SATA hub. The CPU:PCH interface via DMI 2.0 4x has not changed from X79 to X99 and remains a bi-directional data path with a peak bandwidth of 20GB/sec. In designing any PCH, the bandwidth allocation by device type cannot have changed in total, but the added inclusions of M.2 and SATA Express may have fouled up the logic somewhere.... Intel's 8-port PCIe 3.0 (8x) RAID card cannot connect to the CPU via the PCH, so - for it to work - any driver software must allow the CPU to "see" that 8-lane slot-connected device directly over the PCIe 3.0 to CPU interface and to correctly identify that device as a RAID controller and not a GPU or PCIe SSD. Given that PCIe 3.0 bandwidth per lane (actually 985 MB/sec) is, to all intents and purposes, double the bandwidth per lane of PCIe 2.0 (500 MB/sec), any PCIe 3.0 8x / 8-port SATA RAID card should offer a peak raw data rate potential of almost 1000 MB/sec (just how this translates to real data transfer rates up/down is something else - and someone else can figure it out...). This kind of potential performance is way ahead anything available via any CPH-based SATA 6G approach. If this doesn't work then I'm going to be somewhat p*ssed off as I don't see a way to achieve a nine-HDD disk array that delivers decent data transfer rates across all nine drives using any PCH-based solution as the SATA management section(s) of the PCH are going to be a bottleneck (unless someone either knows something I don't or can figure out some bypass approach). This last point is one of the reasons I've not pursued any NAS-based solution and any fibre-based SAN solution is way too costly for a home-office solution. I got rather excited when I saw some early tests on Intel's 750 PCIe 3.0 NVME-based SSD but that approach doesn't help my mass storage requirements - it just offers a single drive that can perform at around five times the throughput of any current SATA 6G single drive - a bit like considering a Ferrari when you need a bus... I guess I'll now wait and see what the various experts come up with... Dave ------------- If music be the love of food, eat on |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 24 Jul 2015 at 3:32pm
|
Before I show my testing results, which we can decide if it has any significance, I noticed something in an earlier post of yours. That is: "All drive SATA connections are from the motherboard ports to their corresponding hotswap bay connectors...". Hot swap bay connectors set off a red flag, please explain what the hotswap bays are. Part of a PC case? An add on piece of hardware? Hotswap bays are known trouble makers. Do you know if they are "active", meaning powered due to their own circuitry, or purely passive, unpowered? I'm aware of hot swap bays that won't allow some drives to operate at all. Since the Z87 chipset, Intel has adopted some of the SATA 3.1 protocols, which leaves some drives behind, as their controllers are not compatible with those protocols. This includes some SSDs with early SSD controllers. That may also affect some of your drives. The closest SSD I have to DevillEars' Samsung is my Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD. This is the 840 Evo on the SSATA_0 port:  That is a normal result for an 840 EVO, with the CPU idling, so a non-tweaked benchmark result. Since the result seemed normal, but I was only testing one drive, I ran three instances of AS SSD at the same time, two for drives on the SATA_0 - 5 ports, and the 840 EVO still on the SSATA_0 port. The is the result for the 840 EVO:  Yes, the results are slightly better. That was caused by the load of three instances of AS SSD taking at least one core of the CPU out of its idle, low clock speed, as well as the core not being in a C State power saving state. This benchmark and SATA IO in general is not CPU intensive, at least for high performance processors. Just for comparison, the SanDisk OS SSD I posted the benchmark for previously took the greatest performance hit, but that was due to it serving as the OS drive with more work to do:  I'm really wondering what your configuration of drives and other hardware really is, which is important to know and may be related to your issues. The following is from the Intel® C610 Series Chipset and Intel® X99 Chipset Platform Controller Hub (PCH) datasheet: Serial ATA (SATA) Controller The PCH has three integrated SATA host controllers that support independent DMA operation on up to total ten ports and supports data transfer rates of up to 6.0 Gb/s on all ports. The SATA controller contains two modes of operation?”a legacy mode using I/O space, and an AHCI mode using memory space. Software that uses legacy mode will not have AHCI capabilities. The PCH supports the Serial ATA Specification, Revision 3.0. The PCH also supports several optional sections of the Serial ATA II: Extensions to Serial ATA 1.0 Specification, Revision 1.0 (AHCI support is required for some elements). That does not seem to be an on-die SATA hub, or a kludge. Link to this datasheet: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/x99-chipset-pch-datasheet.html" rel="nofollow - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/x99-chipset-pch-datasheet.html IF it turns out the SATA ports on the X99 chipset are the limiting factor, a true workstation board with the C610 chipset (enterprise version of the X99) may be a better choice for your requirements. |
Posted By: DevillEars
Date Posted: 24 Jul 2015 at 4:54pm
|
Hi Parsec, Many thanks for your efforts to-date - they are much appreciated. With respect to your question regarding the hotswap bays, these are an integral element of the chassis in use - a Lian-Li PC-Z70 full tower: Link: http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-z70/" rel="nofollow - http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-z70/ There are three modules, each offering three bays. Each module has three power connectors and three SATA signal connectors - one set per drive bay - and these are all "pass-through" connections. My other system is housed in the "baby brother" of this chassis - Lian-Li's PC-Z60 mid-tower - which has two modules of three bays each and works fine in conjunction with an Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional board and six x 6TB drives with an OCZ Vertex 3 256GB SSD as OS drive. PC-Z60 Link: http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-z60/" rel="nofollow - http://www.lian-li.com/en/dt_portfolio/pc-z60/ The only physical differences between the two setups are the motherboards and the number of modules/drives (Both boards share the same hotswap module design - 2 modules in older system and 3 modules in new one). Connection differences are the most obvious as the older system has the following connection layout: SATA_0: SSD (Primary boot device) SATA_1: DVD R/W (Secondary boot device) SATA_2: HDD (6TB Seagate Enterprise) SATA_3: HDD (6TB Seagate Enterprise) SATA_4: HDD (6TB Seagate Enterprise) SATA_5: HDD (750GB Seagate 2.5" 7200rpm Office Data drive) S_SATA_0: HDD (6TB WD Green) S_SATA_1: HDD (6TB WD Green) S_SATA_2: HDD (6TB WD Green) S_SATA_3: BrD R/W With this connection layout (optimised so that faster drives share the faster Z77 ports and the slower drives share the slower ASMedia ports), I get very satisfactory data transfer rates that reflect the combination of drive speeds and port speeds. Copying from SATA_2 to SATA_3 yields copy rates (ex TeraCopy) of in excess of 200MB/sec, while copying from SATA_2 to S_SATA_0 yields speeds of up to 170MB/sec (both speeds being close to the maximum attainable rate per drive type). Even USB 3.0 copies show benefits - copying to a 3TB ST3000DM001 (in Zalman USB 3.0 dock) from SATA_2 was hitting 170MB/sec and achieving an overall rate across 2TB of 140MB/sec. So, given that the "hotswap concern" is a common element across two configurations and that one works fine while the other "is on a go-slow strike", I would rule out the hotswap as a contributing factor. The new system was built on Monday/Tuesday this past week with no HDDs available for testing - just the Samsung SSD. The port connection layout is as follows: SATA_0: Wired but no drive SATA_1: Wired but no drive SATA_2: DVD/RW SATA_3: Wired but no drive SATA_4: Wired but no drive SATA_5: Wired but no drive S_SATA_0: Wired but no drive S_SATA_1: SSD (850PRO) S_SATA_2: Seagate ST3000DM001 S_SATA_3: Seagate ST3000DM001 plus for performance evaluation: Marvell_0: Seagate ST3000DM001 Marvell_1: Seagate ST3000DM001 This situation is temporary as the plan is to migrate the 6TB drives from old system to new and to have the drive:port allocations mirror the logic used in older system drive:port allocations. Until, however, this current "go-slow situation" is resolved, I will fill the new system with 3TB drives to be filched from external enclosures. The folks who built the new rig will be back on Monday and will re-configure the port:bay wiring connections as per one of my earlier posts and then I'll be in a better position to assess the situation. The overall configuration of the new rig is as follows: Chassis: Lian-Li PC-Z70 PSU: Corsair AX860 Mobo: Asrock Fatal1ty X99X Killer CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K (stock clock) RAM: 4 x 8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2133 GPU: EVGA GTX970 Superclocked version Cooler: Corsair H80i GT SSD: Samsung 850PRO HDD: 4 x Seagate ST3000DM001 (to be upped to a total of 9 drives) DVD: Asus DW-A24R DVD writer BRD: LG BluRay Writer (BW-L16R) SATA: Sunix S2600 2-port PCIe 2.0 1x SATA 6G card O/S: Windows 8.1 (patched to current level) Plus externals: Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000 (Kbd & Rodent) LG IPS236V 23" FHD IPS monitor I hope that is enough info? PS: I take your point regarding "not a kludge" - my bad! Regards, Dave
------------- If music be the love of food, eat on |
Posted By: DevillEars
Date Posted: 01 Aug 2015 at 11:09pm
|
SATA performance "cause" determined and issue resolved! Firstly, the drive:port allocation was re-done by re-connecting all drive:port cables so that the connections were as follows (my thanks to my dealer/neighbour who shall remain nameless  ):SATA_0 : Samsung 850PRO (System/OS Drive) SATA_1 : Seagate ST3000DM001 (Data) SATA_2 : Seagate ST3000DM001 (Data) SATA_3 : Seagate ST3000DM001 (Data) S_SATA_1 : Seagate ST3000DM001 (Data) USB 3.0: Sandisk Extreme 64GB flash drive (Other ports rewired to appropriate empty hotswap bays) Ran Teracopy permutations after re-connections above and all ran at between 60 and 80 MB/sec (from SATA_0 to SATA_2, from USB 3.0 to SATA_0, from SATA_2 to S_SATA_1 etc.) Data being copied comprised 31 x .mkv files totalling 54.1 GB. This seemed suspicious - why should performance be consistently low across connections of different bandwidth capability?). Downloaded Crystal Disk Mark and ran some tests on SATA_0 (SSD), SATA_2 and S_SATA_1 (7200rpm HDDs) with the following results for sequential read: SATA_0: 520 MB/sec SATA_2: 180 MB/sec S_SATA_1 : 175 MB/sec This performance seemed better aligned to the bandwidth potential of the drives, so decided to uninstall Teracopy and run copy tests using Win 8.1 File Copy instead: SATA-0 to SATA_2: 183 MB/sec SATA-0 to S_SATA_1: 179 MB/sec USB 3.0 to SATA_0: 235 MB/sec SATA_2 to SATA_1: 165 MB/sec This spread of performance mirrored the pattern from Crystal Disk Mark as well as the bandwidth potentials of each pairing with the peak performance of 235 MB/sec coming from a solid-state USB 3.0 flash drive (Sandisk Extreme 64GB) to an SSD (Samsung 850PRO). Copying from the SSD to two different Seagate ST3000DM001 7200rpm 3TB HDDs gave similar results - irrespective of which SATA group (SATA or S_SATA), while copying from one ST3000DM001 to another (on separate SATA groups) yielded almost 180 MB/sec and when both ST3000DM001 disks were connected to the same controller (SATA), copy rate dropped a wee bit (~8% down) as could be expected due to drive contention on same controller. So, the root cause of my earlier poor file copy performance had nothing to do with hardware from either Intel manufacture or Asrock implementation but would appear to have been due to a freeware copy utility I've used elsewhere with no similar challenges. All I can think of is that the version downloaded was corrupted, but I will - henceforth - avoid using this freeware copy tool and stick with the MS Windows File Copy. To Parsec: My apologies for unfounded comments regarding "kludges" To all here: My thanks for your inputs and tolerance - much appreciated To unnamed dealer/neighbour: My sincere thanks for your time & effort - also much appreciated All's well that ends well...  Dave
------------- If music be the love of food, eat on |
Posted By: mikejonesny
Date Posted: 25 Jan 2021 at 1:34am
|
Does Asrock X99X has got support for SATA 3gbps hdd, I'm not a tech guy and just studying on the best budget options / alternatives for my current sys replacement, stumbled upon this post and thought I should better ask, im taking a look at various sata 3gbps options from allhdd here: https://www.allhdd.com/hard-disk-drive/sata-3gbps/ but do still in a decision mode, don't know whether I shoudl go for hp, seagate or dell 1tb hdds, can anyone confirm port availability for sata 3gbps i would be grateful, or if i dont get a reply ill post a new thread if needed. ------------- be the best! |
Posted By: Xaltar
Date Posted: 25 Jan 2021 at 5:21pm
From the product spec sheet. So yes, it supports all SATA standards. As for HDD brands, I would recommend Western Digital (WD), black, blue or green depending on your budget and requirements. I have had nothing but bad luck with Seagate for many years now. ------------- 
|