Max number of SATA drives using the Asus Z170 Maximus VIII Extreme Motherboard

[Jamez_Morgan]

Hi,

I'm trying to determine how many SATA drives I can use with Asus Z170 Maximus VIII Extreme Motherboard with the internal Raid 5 architecture and a M2 drive connected. Is it even possible? I know SATA EXPRESS 1 will not work as a SATA port if a M2 SATA Drive is connected.

Your comments will be gratefully received.

James

 

[Pr3d4t0r]

Hey James,

I might be wrong but afaik;

z170 is limited to 6 sata 6GB/s physical connectors (some i3's might be limited by southbridge as, too lazy to look for it) and it has 20 pcie 3.0 electrical lanes, most i7 7600k only supports 16 of those.

So; You should be able to use 6 sata ports total by the cpu, then asus slapped additional sata controller for the sata express (they use 2 big sata and 1 small), so you get total of 8 assuming you don't use sata express, black one's are only for data sata devices (what asus says...) and u2 and m.2 are pcie.

So you should be able to get upto 8 sata hdd running at 6GB/s, you only need 3 hdd for raid5, if you plan to fill all 8, I'd just go and use raid 10 instead for performance, or if you're going for larger raid and don't need the speed then raid 5 will do.