What cables do I need with M4 drive?

arekgreenman888 · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:18

No idea what to get or if its included with to hook up to z77 ud3h board.

wazza300 · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:20

just a sata cable which will come with your motherboard,usually they include four cables in the mb box

the sata power connector will be joined to your psu just plug it into the ssd,connect the sata cable to the first intel sata3 port

sata2/sata3 cables are identical in performance

panyan · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:26

try to connect it to a sata 3 port on the mobo for optimal performance and remember to set it in ahci before installing windows

arekgreenman888 · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:28

panyan said:
try to connect it to a sata 3 port on the mobo for optimal performance and remember to set it in ahci before installing windows

what is ahci? thanks

Surveyor · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:42

Connect the SSD to one of the white SATA ports on the motherboard.

Set the SATA controller to AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode in the BIOS.

An SSD performs better using this mode rather than IDE.

Disconnect any other SSDs/HDDs while installing Windows on the SSD.

wazza300 · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:43

ahci enables extra features like native command queing and will give the best read/write figures on an ssd,enable it in the bios before you install windows(beat me to it!!)^^^

Surveyor · 24 Apr 2012 at 00:45

wazza300 said:
(beat me to it!!)^^^

Nah, I'm too tired to explain so just gave a link.

You summed it up perfectly

Yeggstry · 24 Apr 2012 at 10:04

wazza300 said:
sata2/sata3 cables are identical in performance

Interesting. I just bought the Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z and it came with three SATA cables, one was explicitly named as "SATA 6 Gbit/s" whereas the other two weren't labelled. Needless to say I am using that one for my M4, but it is very misleading.

arekgreenman888 · 20 Jun 2012 at 21:18

Yeggstry said:
Interesting. I just bought the Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z and it came with three SATA cables, one was explicitly named as "SATA 6 Gbit/s" whereas the other two weren't labelled. Needless to say I am using that one for my M4, but it is very misleading.

Thats what am stuck on now. THere are 4 calbes with z77 ud3h - 2 pack and 2 blue. Which one s are sata 3? Thanks