Wondering if the Gerbils have thoughts or suggestions on a situation I have that may or may not be abnormal.
My main computer has an i5-6600K mounted on an Asus Z170-Sabertooth board, 16 gb of DDR4-3000, GTX 970 (Working on making that a 1070 soon) on pcie slot #1.
I recently received a 960 EVO NVMe SSD for an early birthday present. So I figure, why not make use of it. I followed advice given here and elsewhere, and disconnected all other drives and, using a Lycom DT-120 M.2 to PCIe adapter card, mounted it in pcie slot #3. Went into UEFI and set it M.2 , set pcie #3 to x4 , and set it to hyper kit mode.
Then rebooted and used gparted to create an NTFS partition on the ssd. All was good at this point. The drive only shows up in UEFI as the boot drive, but I guess this is normal from what others have said. I then did a fresh install of Windows 10 and installed the samsung nvme driver and all other mobo drivers. Then shut down and connected my WD hdd as storage and an Asus optical drive on sata ports 3 and 4 respectively, as I found that when using M.2 setting then sata ports 1 and 2 are unavailable.
So far, so good. All was working fine and CrystalDiskMark 5 gave me good scores on the EVO. However, I have since found that sata ports 5 and 6, which are sata express normally but become plain sata ports when using M.2, are also now unavailable. So I'm down to 2 usable sata ports, out of 6, besides the boot drive.
So this makes me wonder, is this normal or not. I realize that the EVO is new tech and although Asus claims the motherboard can handle NVMe, should it require losing four sata ports to accomplish the task, or have I fuddled it up?