a) Do I understand correctly that I can use at most 6 of the 8 S-ATA ports? According to the manual, 0 and 1 as well as 4 and 5 are connected. ("share lanes, if one is used, the other is disabled").

b) Two of the ports (A1 & A2) are from ASMedia ("ASM1061, supports NCQ, AHCI & Hot Plugging"). But according to Google I can also attach everything there, just no RAID and is at best a bit slower. Did I understand that correctly?

Question

a) Do I understand correctly that I can use at most 6 of the 8 S-ATA ports? According to the manual, 0 and 1 as well as 4 and 5 are connected. ("share lanes, if one is used, the other is disabled").

b) Two of the ports (A1 & A2) are from ASMedia ("ASM1061, supports NCQ, AHCI & Hot Plugging"). But according to Google I can also attach everything there, just no RAID and is at best a bit slower. Did I understand that correctly?

Accepted Answer

a) "M2_1, SATA3_0 and SATA3_1 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the others will be disabled.
M2_2, SATA3_4 and SATA3_5 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the others will be disabled" it is about the m.2 ports which are connected via the chipset and therefore need sata bandwidth. 
b) the slightly slower I don't think you'll notice, you just can't use raid with normal sata devices. 
Hope this helps.

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