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Richard asked: “I was curious as to how to add more storage drives to my motherboard. The motherboard I currently have is the MSI 970 Gaming. I believe it has 5 or 6 SATA connections. I was trying to figure out what type of adapter I could use to hook up more hard drives.”
It’s pretty much what you said: your motherboard has 6 SATA connectors so you need SATA data and power cables and connect them to SATA drives.
It’s really pretty simple, you should be able to give your extra hard drives power with one connector, data with the other, and be up and running.
You will actually have to do most of the work under Windows to make sure the drives are formatted to whatever format you prefer and that they are arranged in a RAID array of your choosing if you’d like to set them up to work together. The physical part is very simple though, you just plug in a couple of cables and you’re set, and the adapters you’re looking for aren’t really adapters, they’re just those two cables: SATA data and SATA power and it’s likely that they will come in a single connector.
Be aware that not all SATA ports are created equal on motherboards
Be aware that not all SATA ports are created equal on motherboards. Sometimes you will encounter a mix of 3 gigabit per second and 6 gigabit per second ports, as well as some ports that are dedicated to a RAID controller and others that are not.
Use a little care, especially if your computer doesn’t seem to see the drives after you connect them up. You may find they work if you shuffle them to a different port.