Maximum PC

My SABERTOOTH 990FX has 8 SATA III ports. 6 are listed as AMD ports and then there are 2 gray ports that are listed with ASMEDIA. The descriptions don't lead me to believe there is any difference. Does anyone know if there is any difference between these SATA III ports?

Different controller driving them.

Why would they do that? What does using two different controllers do?

Agreed Kleink. Intel use to take so much pride in that sort of stuff but are so very late to the parade. Two!? That's what you've given me since the P67? Two!? Life must be great when you can kick back and get the ball rolling years later :p

I think the p67 had 2 S/ATAIII via Intel, 2 S/ATAII via Intel (4?), then any other pair of S/ATAIII would call for a Marvell chip and was extra clunky. And for Intel minded folk, "Asmedia" might even mean the USB3.0 controller. I wouldn't hook anything up to the Marvell ports on those boards anyway and the USB3.0 can be iffy at times with USB2.0 legacy devices. AMD sure is behind on the performance per clock cycle AND cores; but darn it if they had a lot of S/ATA3, USB3.0, and a much better AGP/GPU on their units.

But heck, maybe Intel had their thinking caps on. Who really needs more than two S/ATA3 ports? Those are really only for SSD drives and no one should really have 4 (yet), let alone 6. Is someone out there RAID5'ing five SSD's? I haven't met a spindle drive to date that has stressed S/ATA2. Now that the market is showing SSD's are very valid and more affordable are they just beginning to implement a total of six S/ATA3, is this now validated?

Me personally.....I need at least 3 SATA ports. I keep one small SSD to run my OS and a few proggys, one 3TB hard drive that is completely full and soon I will need a second 3TB hard drive. One optical drive too.

My builds last a good 4-5 years before they need to be replaced and I would assume SSD prices per GB will drop significantly the next few years hopefully yielding affordable, multi TB SSD's.

Yes, you need S/ATA ports...but only one of your drives need to be S/ATA3. The 3TB drives are spindles and still fine on the plethora of S/ATA2 ports both Intel and AMD have. There's not a single spindle drive that breaks S/ATA2's cap, including the 1TB Raptor. Your 3TB drives are just fine on the common ports.

My point was that it's very rare that anyone has more than 2 SSD's that need S/ATA3's speed in order to spread their wings, so just two S/ATA3 ports are really fine. If they're RAID'ing SSD's they also need to have an external card as it's still software RAID using the onboard ports. The H77-I has 6 ports, so I'm not saying Intel has a shortage of ports in general, but only two are S/ATA3 where AMD has a herd of them. In a world of really freaking fast SSD's and 4TB spindles, I just don't see the need for a bunch of ports...or towers to hold them all in general.

I'm a big pusher of growing smaller. My mATX case has spots for 4 drives + 1 SSD, then two external drives. With 3TB really being optimal currently with the prices, that's 12TB's I could shove in there and never use. What is anyone going to do with 8 S/ATA ports of any flavor? Two are generally just fine.

I wouldn't hold my breath on SSD prices dropping any lower than they are now. It's kind of a standard now and 1TB is still way off in the horizon as far as decent pricing goes. $1 a Gig is current and you'd need to get to $.25 a Gig in two years to be applicable; I just don't see it happening like that. SSD's aren't meant to hold stagnant files. They can, but that's just not stuff you need that speed for (think of a Ferrari to go shopping with). A 1TB spindle drive can cost $50 and we're nowhere close to that type of product when it comes to SSD's. We're still battling the $120 for highend 128G SSD's (Midlevel having 256G at the same price point)...that would be $1,000 currently for a 1TB. I just don't see that happening any time soon.

Well, hold a spindle drive in your hand and then hold (as big as you can find) SSD. It seems like it would cost more to produce a spindle drive then it would an SSD.

I remember when the music companies CRIED and CRIED how much it cost to press a music CD. They got has high as $22 for a new CD and it came out later that it cost 1/10th the cost of a tape cassette. Maybe someone here knows how much it costs to produce an SSD compared to a spindle drive????

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10196422-64.html#!

Nobody knows, but the cost of producing anything is fairly straightfoward: it takes a while to perfect the fabs for the process. Hard drives have been around for 30+ years, machines to build them have been around forever. Everyone who's in the business already knows how to make it and make it well in large quantities.

Flash for consumers isn't even 15 years old yet. SSDs probably haven't gone beyond 5 years old. Sure the technology is rapidly evolving, but the fabrication process hasn't matured yet.

It's the same reason why nobody wants to move away from the 12cm optical disk form factor even though other, probably better form factors have been proposed. What's easier to do for labor, consumers, and the bottom line: build a new form factor that's compatible with nothing, which means you have to purchase new fabrication machines... or respin your DVD making machines into Blu-Ray making machines which only affects the last step in the process?