Significance of blue coloured SATA connector on Gigabyte mobo?

Mar 25, 2017 7 Replies

I've been given an old tower computer with a Gigabyte motherboard. It has four SATA sockets, labelled 0, 1, 2 and 3.



SATA socket #0 is coloured blue, the other three are black.



Is there any significance to the blue one, other than it is SATA-0?



I don't have a manual for this mobo and haven't been able to locate one on the internet yet. It's a very old mobo, circa 2006, but it still goes! Seems a shame to junk it.



MM


Often, that's a 6Mb/s port. Still works normally.

What he said :) Gigabyte are pretty good at having old manuals on their site though, should be there somewhere :)

Well, I tried searching. I've searched for hours and have so far found exactly nothing. The motherboard is stamped GA-8TRC410M-NF and, now that I have restored all BIOS defaults and can see the startup logo, have discovered that the PC was originally a Packard-Bell.

MM

I wonder if PB had custom made motherboards for their PCs and consequently were *supposed* to provide all further support?

Tim

You're right. I used Belarc to find as much info about the mobo I could and Belarc determined it to be a NEC Computers International product (made by Gigabyte). Then I found a Packard Bell serialnumberdetectiontool.exe via an ftp link and this told me that the board was in a PB iMedia 1529 PC, Model/Type UTOW-RIO S/N 0498-19220547. In fact, the board was commonly referred to as a Rio GA-8TRC410M-NF. On the way I read a number of comments that this board was one of the worst Gigabyte ever produced, although the PC I was given runs very well.

Further searches on the Wayback Machine found a lot of detail about this board, though still not the actual motherboard manual. However, later I found loads of full colour high res images of the board, some with the various pins and connectors clearly labelled. So I know a lot more about the board now than I did yesterday!

However, time to save up for a mobo bundle, methinks. £139.99 for this, for example:

formatting link

MM

ON mine, ga-p55m-ud2 (Circa July 2009), the difference between the 2 blue and 5 white seems to be to do with raid.

Both appear to do raid just different types. They call them GSATA and P55 SATA, I guess different controllers like Rod mentioned.

Both are SATA 2 (3Gb/s).

As your MB is earlier I doubt it is SATA 3 (6Gb/s). Maybe even SATA 1 (1.5 Gb/s)

As a general point, entering the motherboard type number into google with the word 'manual' should net you a good PDF that will tell you exactly what the hardware and connectors are, and do.

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