Motherboard SATA compatibility

Hi, I've recently been debating between the ASRock P67 Extreme4 and the Asus P8P67 Pro. I understand that the Asus board is of higher quality, but I am on a budget.

My main concern is that under the details of the ASRock board, it doesn't list any SATA 3Gb/s. I was intending on purchasing the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB HDD. So my question is, is the ASRock board compatible with the Spinpoint?

In the details section of the ASRock, it does say this however. "(SATA3_M2 connector is shared with eSATA3 port)" What is that?

Thanks a lot.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...57-217^13-157-217-TS,13-131-682^13-131-682-TS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ab=true&Keywords=sata+6&Page=1#scrollFullInfo

SATA ports are backwards compatible, so you'll be fine

What odd to me about that board's specs is that only "4 SATAIII ports" are listed in the specs, but there are 8 SATA ports on the board...

Both boards support SATA3 (6Gb/s), which means they will also run SATA (1.5Gb/s) and SATA2 (3Gb/s) since they are backwards compatible. Do note that those numbers actually mean jack. Normal HDDs can't even reach the limits of SATA2, not to even mention SATA3. A slightly different story with high-end SSDs, those actually have read/write speeds high enough to exceed SATA2 limits and achieve speeds only SATA3 supports.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Revisions

The shared connector means that the board has an eSATA port on the rear I/O and it runs on the same chip and your internal SATA drives.

Thanks so much.