When the Intel X79 platform was first announced it was supposed to include several features that would be new to the Intel desktop line. One of the features was Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) ports. Unfortunately due to compatibility issues, Intel announced that that feature was no longer included and that feature had been completely disabled within the Intel X79 chipset. The reason for 'removing' this feature was because Intel observed the x79 SCU SAS/SATA controller may exhibit one or more random ports with unreliable I/O performance. Now that you have a little bit of background information we proceed to the issue at hand.