ASRock P55 Extreme4 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel P55 chipset is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports (RAID support is optional), no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, an embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control), and eight x1 PCI Express lanes.

The ASRock P55 Extreme4 provides all six SATA-300 ports with support for Intel Matrix Storage,which provides RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 (these ports are blue). This product comes with four white SATA-600 (a.k.a. SATA 6G) ports, and each pair is controlled by a different chip, and you must pay attention because the chips are different and provide different features.

The ports labeled “SATA3_1” and “SATA3_2” are controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip that provides support for RAID 0 and 1. The ports labeled “SATA3_3” and “SATA3_4” are controlled by a Marvell 88SE9120 chip, which doesn’t support RAID. So if you want to build a RAID array with your SATA-600 hard drives or SSDs, you must use the first two SATA-600 ports.

The P55 Extreme4 also has an eSATA-600 port on the rear panel. This port shares the “SATA3_4” connector, so if you install an eSATA device you can’t use the fourth SATA-600 port.

This motherboard has one ATA-133 port. Only this port is placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°. All SATA ports are placed where expansion cards won’t block them.

Figure 4: SATA-300 and ATA-133 ports

Figure 5: SATA-600 ports