With regards to the SATA port situation, Intel is enabling ten SATA ports total but only six of them for RAID. While this is an update over X79, it seems more of a fudge. One would assume that it could be a bandwidth issue, because the link between the CPU and chipset (PCH) is at 20 Gbit/s, or 2.5 GBps which would be saturated by a 5-6 disk RAID-0 array. However, it seems silly to not have RAID on four of those ports. Due to Intel’s previous flex-IO arrangement on Z97, this seems more of an integrated SATA 6 Gbps hub, splitting the bandwidth into four ports. Due to the hub it would limit throughput in RAID so it makes sense to disable it completely for those ports. Intel is telling us that this is due to two separate AHCI controllers in the chipset, with only one of the AHCI controllers enabled for RAID.