No, not all SATA ports have the same speed on a motherboard.
No, not all SATA ports have the same speed on a motherboard.
Your motherboard has six SATA3 ports, and you're experiencing slower performance on one HDD after a cable change. You're considering swapping it with an SSD and testing both with another Samsung 860 Evo to compare speeds. In CrystalDiskMark, the two SSDs should show similar read/write results unless there are other factors affecting the benchmark.
They all operate at 6Gb/s, yet SATA 5 and 6 link directly to your CPU instead of via the chipset. In practice, those might not offer much extra speed. SATA 5 and 6 also disable when you use an M.2 device.
I used a Samsung 970 Pro as the boot source and didn’t realize it would disable SATA5 and SATA6 ports. I’m planning to test SATA1 and SATA2 for comparison, hoping the SATA2 won’t slow down by about 30MB/s compared to SATA1. After swapping the cables, my HDD speed fell from 183MB/s to 153MB/s.
The remaining four SATA connections follow the same pattern to your device. Still, unexpected issues might occur.