**Official** Asrock Z68 Extreme4 thread. Share your experiences, OCs & tech issues!

[glorp]

I don't know wht Asrock would do that aside from the option for users to turn off ports their not using to save power.

But the options are all labelled "*External* SATA Port" [Enable/Disable]
and they don't actually disable the Intel ports anyway since all mine in use are disabled and they all still work fine.

My theory is that that option was intended to be made available for the 2 Marvell ports to select which one would be set to provide the eSATA functionality but some AsRock BIOS engineer screwed the pooch and set the options up for the Intel ports instead. So the Marvell chip is not told that one of its ports is being used for eSATA and it's not ready to handle the flood of interrupts that it gets when you plug in an external device and that what causes it to lock up the PCI bus.