Stephen P. Molnar composed on 2018-08-11 11:19 (UTC-0400):
I am running Debian Stretch on my 64bit Linux platform.
I am planning on installing a 500B SSD as the boot HD and have a
question about the SATA connectors on the ASUS M5A97 R2.0 MB.
I have what I thought was a simple question, but Google has not been a
friend to me. What I found via that route was that the 6 SATA ports are
the same. Should the boot drive be plugged into SATA8G_1?
Recommended, but not necessary. After a BIOS reset, any HD or SSD plugged into
that port should be recognized as /dev/sda. Putting your preferred boot device
on it might be the easiest way to have an otherwise unrecognized device become
recognized, but you should be able to have it recognized as primary via advanced
BIOS setup regardless.