I'm building a WIN 8.1 Home Server based on an Asus P8H77-M LE motherboard. The H77 chipset implementation on this board provides a total of six (6) SATA ports: two (2) 6.0Gb/s and four (4) 3.0Gb/s. I'm using an Intel 520 120GB SSD as OS drive, an optical (CD/DVD) drive and two (2) WD RE 2.0TB 6.0Gb/s drives for the storage pool. The SERVER is up and running with SSD (configured as AHCI) and optical drive connected to 3.0Gb/s ports. I know conventional wisdom is to always connect a SATA rev.3 SSD to a SATA rev.3 (6.0Gb/s) port, but I find SSD performance connected to a SATA rev.2 port more than adequate and am thinking the best (lowest) file transfer times will be achieved by connecting the WD RE storage pool drives to the SATA rev.3 ports. Then again the WD RE's are mechanical drives, which I believe can not take full advantage of SATA rev.2, let alone SAT rev. 3.
Thanks for your thoughts on this!