I use of 700 x 23 out of habit . Why 25 ? <| sep |> Take a look at this . In the image , to the right of the 4 blue SATA ports , there two more . They ' re white ports , on top of each other facing away from the board . You can have 6 drives connected by SATA cables . That board also has an mSATA slot in the middle of it as well , that you can use with an mSATA drive . If you needed more SATA ports , you can get PCIe cards for this . Edit Also , your white SATA ports are the ones you want to be using for your main drives eg an SSD with your OS on it as they ' re the faster SATA 3 6 Gbs ones . The blue ports are SATA 2 3 Gbs . Edit 2 According to the gigabyte website The SATA 2 5 connector will become unavailable when the mSATA connector is installed with a solid state drive . So if you use an mSATA drive , you can only have 5 drives connected to SATA 04 as the SATA 5 port will be unavailable .