What is the SATA port on my Dell 790i Ultra SLI for?

Question

What is the red SATA port just above my video card slot for? It's all alone and I'm not sure if I can use it for a HDD. Does anyone know?

Answer 1

Forum post about red ports:

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=113421&mpage=1

Apparently the red sata port is eSATA and not as fast as the other ports. You can use it for whatever you like, but others recommend not using it if you have open black ports and using the red ones for slower drives like optical drives that wouldn't benefit anyway from a faster port.

Answer 2

It's the JMicron controller: will show as a "eSATA Drive" when the bios loads: again, it appears to run at SATA I speed (1500 Kbps --> transfer rate maxed out at 140 MB/s on a AGILITY 3 SSD (which almost saturates the SATA III interface...)) In my quest for finding the fastest SATA port on the 790i, I found out the the ones that are perpendicular (2 ports) are the fastest (transfer speed of 260 MB/s on me SSD)