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Difficulty: MediumStorage Devices and Interfaces

A technician is upgrading the storage on a workstation used for media rendering. The motherboard manual specifies that populating the secondary M.2 slot with an SSD will automatically disable two of the motherboard's six onboard SATA 3.0 ports. Which of the following best explains why these SATA ports become unavailable?

  1. The secondary M.2 slot shares flexible I/O lanes on the motherboard chipset with those specific SATA ports.Answer
  2. B
    Installing an M.2 drive forces the storage controller to reconfigure all remaining SATA ports into a mandatory RAID array.
  3. C
    The M.2 format requires AHCI protocol emulation, which draws power away from adjacent SATA data connectors.
  4. D
    SATA 3.0 cables lack the shielding necessary to prevent electromagnetic interference from active M.2 slots.

Answer

The secondary M.2 slot shares flexible I/O lanes on the motherboard chipset with those specific SATA ports.
Motherboard chipsets allocate a finite number of High-Speed Input/Output (HSIO) bus lanes across built-in controllers. To provide flexibility, manufacturers multiplex these lanes so that an M.2 slot and specific SATA ports share the same bandwidth pathways. Populating the M.2 slot routes those lanes to the SSD, rendering the shared physical SATA ports disabled.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the physical and architectural constraints described in the scenario.
Identified that populating a specific M.2 slot results in the loss of dedicated SATA controller ports.
Motherboard chipsets feature a multiplexed pool of High-Speed I/O (HSIO) lanes divided between SATA controllers, PCIe slots, and M.2 connectors.
2
Evaluate the cause of resource conflicts on modern motherboards.
When an M.2 slot is activated, the motherboard's switching logic routes the shared chipset lanes exclusively to the M.2 slot, disabling the assigned onboard SATA ports.
This lane sharing (multiplexing) allows manufacturers to offer multiple connection types without exceeding maximum chipset HSIO limits.

Key Concept

Motherboard Chipset HSIO Lane Multiplexing and M.2 / SATA Resource Sharing
Estimated Time:1m 15s
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Topics

Storage Devices and Interfaces

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