Motherboard SATA connectors different colors. Why?

[MarsMan63]

I have a new TE01 ENVY Desktop, and I have a technical wquestion about the motherboard. Why are the SATA connectors on the motherboar different colors? For instance, on mine, the SATA0 connector is dark blue, the SATA1 connector is light bblue and the SATA2 connector is white. Is this only for ease of telling them apart visually? Or are they different speeds? What's the dea? Several people I work with have asked me this question.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi, Anthony:

Normally the SATA ports are colored to let you know where to connect your drives to.

Dark blue is used for the boot drive (SATA 0) port, Light blue (SATA 1) for a secondary hard drive, and the white (SATA) 3 is for an optical drive but can also be used for a tertiary hard drive if no optical drive is needed or present.

For example, if your PC came with a mechanical hard drive and you bought a SATA SSD to speed things up, you would have to connect the SATA SSD to the dark blue SATA boot drive port and move the hard drive's SATA data connector to the light blue port if you wanted the mechanical hard drive to be used for additional storage.