what does sata port color means with Dell Inspiron 580?

I got a Dell Inspiron 580 at home. The 4 SATA ports on motherboard are coloured as blue, black, white, black.

See table:

Sata1, Sata2, Sata3, Sata4 Blue black white, black

Does anyone by chance know what the colours mean? What is special about the white?

I googled it but there is no clear answer.

I bought an additional SATA internal hard drive but not sure which port to plug it in.

Thanks,

2 Answers

Plug it into any open SATA port. Dell's documentation provides no reason to pick one over another. In other systems (even 4 port systems - such as my low-end Lenovo server) there might be 3/6 GB/S and/or eSATA by color code, but in this case none of the documentation indicates any difference, so any SATA port should work fine. There's no need to be in sequential order.

In most cases, The color only identifies the order of how the BIOS reads devices attached to the SATA port. There should be labels along side the ports themselves identifying which port is which, as you stated; Plug your new hard-drive into the lowest available number- Your original hard drive should be using Port 1, and your DVD drive is most likely connected to port 2, so plug your hard drive into port 3. Don't unplug any of your current drives and put them into different ports than they already were in as this could screw up how your computer boots.

On some Higher End motherboards, Different colors represent speed differences or which ports can be used in RAID and which ones cannot, but often times these are only found on motherboards with 4+ SATA ports, unlike yours.