I spoke with Dell Technical Support on March 2 about my Service Request for using additional SATA ports on the Inspiron 660/Win 8 system and learned that the problem had been reproduced by Dell. They agreed that there is a problem with the SATA ports in some configurations.
The tech could not tell me:
- a statement of the problem that had been investigated
- what had been done to reproduce/troubleshoot the problem
- what they had learned
- or what was going to be done about it
In the old days when I worked on mainframe computers we used to call it "Broken As Designed" or "BAD".
I was told to expect BIOS upgrades from Dell sometime after March 15 for Dell products running Windows 8. The tech couldn't say if this update would have any effect on this reported SATA port problem.
For now, I'll continue to run with an additional 2-port SATA III PCI-e card with Windows 7 (Legacy BIOS) and Windows 8 (UEFI Secure BIOS).