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Storage connectivity then. SATA ports -- Gigabyte has equipped the board with six SATA ports. These six are linked from the Intel PCH. The four white ports are SATA3 thus 6 Gbps -- the two black ones are SATA2 and thus great for HDDs or opticals -- so you can manage some serious transfer speed with SSD and HDDs alright.
Ah let me just zoom in a little, the six SATA ports. The two black ones are SATA2, perfect for HDDs.
- 4 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3 0~SATA3 3) supporting up to 4 SATA 6Gb/s devices
- 2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2 4~SATA2 5) supporting up to 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
New on the B6 revision is an M.2. slot, keep in mind though that PCIe lanes are scarce with this chipset, in this case the M.2. slot shares its lanes with the secondary x16 slot that runs x4 PCIe 2.0 - so once you populate that M.2. slot the PCIe slot will drop down to x2 mode.
In a perspective view we can see the two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (mechanical) slots; two PCI-Express x1 slots and two PCI slots. Here we can also get a better look at the heatsinks the board uses. What I haven't mentioned just yet is that the motherboard makes use of an ATX form factor, that means it fits pretty much any chassis easily.
