Ports SATA turned off or inactive on the ASUS ROG Strix B350-F Gaming.
Ports SATA turned off or inactive on the ASUS ROG Strix B350-F Gaming.
Earlier this week I discovered that with certain AMD B-series motherboards the SATA ports 5 and 6 become inactive only when a 4x M.2 device is connected. Since I have a 2x drive, I checked my manual again. It doesn’t mention disabling those ports—it just notes bandwidth sharing. There’s no indication that SATA ports 5 and 6 are off by default. Also, the 16GB Optane stick isn’t showing up in the SATA configuration, and those ports can still be turned on or off. So yes, you should still be able to connect drives to ports 5 and 6.
We're going to discover this out! I'm setting up Linux by disconnecting everything except the hard drive for installation. I'm also switching it to a motherboard port rather than my PCIe card since, although it's labeled "bootable," I don't want to hit a 500 MB/s limit.
Choose M.2 slots and avoid SATA 5/6 connections. You retain four standard SATA ports.