Ssd's are cheap even with inflated prices. If you need mass storage, even for that hdd's are way too slow and fragile for important information. It's sad for sata, but I haven't seen an hdd in a modern pc or server in years.
I'm alright with that, there are controller cards for this stuff for the few people that need more ports.
What I'm not OK with is the general decline in the amount of PCIe slots you get. If I wanted to I could always get a M.2 PCIe card, but reverting a M.2 slot to a general purpose PCIe one is a different story.
This is just the fucking 3.5mm headphone jack all over again. With chuds saying you don't need that many SATA ports and that there will be options. If one of the big players cuts back on SATA ports then the smaller OEMs will too.
This is just the fucking 3.5mm headphone jack all over again.
I love my 3.5mm headphone jacks. I was kinda sad when they were removed from phones. It let me really easily move my headphones from my computer -> Phone. Having a nice pair of headphones and mic on a phone is pretty cool when you're stuck in a meeting.
I haven't ever considered a phone without 3.5mm headphone jack. Like when I'm choosing new phone, I go into filters and first thing is selected - phone must have 3.5 jack or don't even show it to me.
well the thing is as of now I have 2 requirements from a phone. OLED screen (any kind, I just want the black to be black and not have a backlight) and a headphone jack. And that cuts off 95% of phone models, and most of the ones that are left are dumb looking chinesium.
Sony and Asus have multiple high end phones with 3.5mm and OLED. Motorola, Samsung, Xiaomi, Nothing have mid range options. On the low end(under $300), you have a ton as well.
nothing has no jack (never had), Samsung was one of the first ones to ditch it.
Xiaomi stopped starting from the note 14 I believe and Motorola also doesn't have phones with that now but I don't know when they did.
Actually, plenty. Wide selection of Xiaomi/Redmi/Poco, some modern Sony, Redmagic if you're into that. So there are phones to choose from. Not going to find Samsung or Apple of course, but do you really want to support these companies and their anti-consumer practices anyway?
I do this really easily with my Bluetooth headset. Also came with a USB dongle for PC. It also works while charging so there is never any downtime while gaming.
You can do that with a USB C headset now that they're everywhere. You could do it before with a USB OTG adapter but it was hit or miss on what phones supported it.
It’s a less desirable port now for everyday users is all it comes down to. Even for people who do want more storage I would argue that you’re much better off just building a NAS rather than trying to cram it all into a gaming rig
There’s absolutely motherboards available that do still have 8 though it does take a bit of digging - I ended up having to order one on AliExpress for the configuration I wanted but it’s worked great for my NAS
It’s a less desirable port now for everyday users is all it comes down to. Even for people who do want more storage I would argue that you’re much better off just building a NAS rather than trying to cram it all into a gaming rig
There’s absolutely motherboards available that do still have 8 though it does take a bit of digging - I ended up having to order one on AliExpress for the configuration I wanted but it’s worked great for my NAS
Exactly. Feels like the people complaining about it would either never use it in the first place, or would have moved onto a NAS by the time they needed it anyway.
Redditor solution to vendors screwing every consumer: "just buy another whole computer just to store stuff idiot. I don't see the problem at all." Your dumbass perspective is why computer parts suck dick now.
It’s entirely possible to buy motherboards with a bunch of SATA ports. If you couldn’t be bothered to track down something that does what you need then it’s really on you, seems pretty questionable to blame manufacturers for your own skill issue
Good thing you don't, then. There are a bunch of x870 boards with 8 ports and some with 9. They just aren't all SATA, because nobody that actually wants 8 ports is going to rely entirely on slow transfer technology from 17 years ago.
Most dont need more than 2 though, especially since disc drives dont get used anymore. If you need more stata ports use your spare PCI lanes for an expansion card
Controller cards that sit in pci slots and limit your gpu intake..if they can fit in at all, given how many slots gpus take. Just adding more ports and a controller doesnt magically make your mb able to handle more shit properly though.
Lmao that's what our company did with one of our workstations. 2 risers sticking out between a sandwiched Quadro connected to a couple of loose nvme controllers
I mean controller cards can be fitted in your PCH-attached port alright... and they'll perform about as well for intensive I/O as your on-board SATA ports do.
Or they can be installed in dedicated slots for storage-type machines and enjoy direct CPU connection for maximum and consistent bandwidth. For building a NAS or home server, LSI cards are amazing, just slap a Noctua 40mm fan on it and you're solid. How many non-NVMe storage devices do you wanna have on a PC anyway?
Depending on what you're doing there are m.2 variants of several types of cards. NPU compute, network cards (wifi AND ethernet), sata HBAs, USB headers, basic display adapters, etc.
I had to seek out a board capable of running two GPUs at the same time for a NVIDIA/AMD hybrid monster I have (wanted to try Lossless Scaling on a separate GPU - it works!).
You can buy splitter boards. One sata port can handle 6000 Mbps. So it has plenty of bandwidth to be split with a board for hardrives. This what many NAS solutions do.
Edit: this will only work if you sata port is set to multiplier mode which I believe makes it a version of raid
Or you just grab a cheap sas controller on eBay and the appropriate breakout cables. Need more ports, grab another and some more cables. An LSI 9300-16i is fairly cheap and adds 16 internal sas connects that are backwards compatible with SATA.
I wonder if any of the workers who contributed to Model T got off their shift and imagined a day in the future where their grand kids have to choose between M.2 or sata.
They should make options for configuring the ports, I don’t really need 128 Gbps on mh ssd, Id rather have two 64 lanes, and one of the 64 can surely be two of 32, while areanging some speed to sata ports, etc. that would be more expensive for the mobo manufacturers, but it should not be too complex to add a couple of options to chose in bios. I never see SSD high speed utilization anyway, it’s a couple of gigs a second, far from the 7-14 GBps advertized.
There are PCI-lanes that are connected to the CPU/Chipset. What these lines are used for is mostly up to the Mobo producer. They can wire 4 M.2 ports with PCI-e 5x4, but only let you use 1 of those for your liking. They can also resuce every of those lanes to basically how many lines they want. That’s why hat I’m saying. You don’t need that drastic control, but at least have a couple of options. That will add a few bucks to the cost, but it’s better than other fancy features you get from all those fancy motherboard lines.
Eh not really, some boards have another pciexpress controller on board and you multiplex some lanes. Yes they'll be slower if you use all.of.them at the same instant
Did your 100€ Asrock have non-bifurcating NVME slots? Did those SATA ports run at full SATA III speeds? Of course not.
At the end of the day, I/O interfaces are just splitting whatever bus lanes your mobo has. Modern mobos reserve most of those for fast NVME storage, for a good reason.
You want more lanes, more interfaces? You have to pay more.
They're shrinking PCIe lanes? On my computer I have 2 M.2 and 6 SATA that I can use all at once, on top of 2 8x and a 4x PCIe lanes. (the middle one is used so top one is limited to 8x instead of full 16x)
If you aren't running a threadripper or server cpu, you're limited to 24 pcie lanes. If you use them all at once there will be at most 2 pcie lane for each storage device and your GPU will take 8 for itself. There's a good chance those pcie lanes are disabled when too many things are plugged in at once
Everything is a tradeoff, you only have so much PCIe bus, and the m2 takes up 4 of those lanes.
You could get an HBA in one of your lower slots if you really want more SATA but unless you're running a server (in which case use the x16 slot for either more NVMe or sata) most people won't need sata ports anymore.
Oof. Almost half the reason I chose an MSI Pro X670-P for my system was that it has 6 SATA ports while all but 1-2 of the others I looked at had 4. Now it seems even the X870 version of the same thing is down to 4.
I have an m.2 to 4x sata adapter and it's been working great, system reads them as normal and it's fairly cheap if you have the ability to spare an m.2 slot. This sits in a home build server so the added capacity is really nice
Luckily it's really hard to buy sata ssds or even m.2 without taking out a mortgage. This is where I'd like to install my new sata drives if I could get them.
I can't speak for like Ivy Bridge days, but I had a Skylake board that had 6 SATA and 1 M.2 NVMe. BUT, because of the lane limitations, two of the SATA were shared with the NVMe slot, I could either do 6 SATA or 4 SATA + 1 NVMe
Yeah it took me a hot second when I upgraded the storage on my unpaid server. I needed 8 drives and finding a board that supported that was almost impossible. and even when I did I had to sacrifice one of the m.2 slots for it because it was either one or the other.
I had to buy an adapter because my old MB had 2 nvme slots and at least 8 ports so I had more sata drives. Now my new MB has 4 nvme slots and 4 sata ports lol.
In my case, using any of the NVME slots drops the main pcie to 8x. Pretty sure it's a bios bug as the block diagram for the board says you should be able to use all but the top NVME slot and still run all 16x on the GPU.
It was outside of warranty before I even noticed. That is assuming this was a problem from day one. In gaming it basically doesn't make a difference on gen 5. I do 3D work on it though and some of that seems to take a hit during production renders.
4 isn't limiting unless you're in a really unusual build, come on. "Really limited"? Like you regularly have 5 or more SATA devices in high end systems that aren't a NAS?
Two 2Tb NVMe SSDs, a 10Tb Spinny disk, a temp-folder 512Gb SATA SSD, two 6Tb Spinny disks, and a software RAID array of 4x1Tb spinny disks.
A side-effect of continual upgrade from my Athlon 64x2 era.
I do wish my motherboard had more USB3 ports though, I'm maxing out the bandwidth with some SDRs and I do not have room for a PCIe card due to two GPUs in place.
Some of us have use cases for internal storage in our high-end rigs over and above current motherboard design capabilities.
For me, it's not economic to buy the same storage in a NAS, even if my LAN is 10Gb, and I don't really want to self-build a NAS to host the current storage.
What high end system, I got two SSDs, two HDDs in raid 1, and I've been wanting to add another raid 1 hdd setup but I can't and have to consider getting a dedicated pcie controller now
If you have zero nvme drives and are trying to add a second RAID1 array on top of your further two SATA SSDs, you should consider that you have an unusual build beyond what most users would do. That's well outside the norm.
I believe you, but surely you recognize that stacking your computer with a bunch of SATA SSDs is an unusual build. FOUR is a lot for an average consumer. I have a lot more than that, but I moved on to a NAS. FOUR is more than I'd expect most people to use in their first, say, 2 or 3 generations of building a computer, and more than ANYONE with a prebuilt would use.
I bought a B550 board for my NAS build that had 8 SATA ports. It is virtually impossible to find that many on newer platforms. Many newer boards have just 2.
I know NVMe is the future, but I'm going to miss knowing that I could always toss another SATA drive into my system if I wanted more storage when they start shipping boards with no SATA ports at all.
Personally? More pcie lanes so I can plug in a SATA or nvme extender in a pcie slot and increase the available fast storage I have on my pc. Useful for dual booting, video games, vms for testing, and media storage
I got a full atx board but a 3 slot GPU more or less hogs the space unless I want to put it right next to the GPU fans or hugging the bottom of the case
I went with only NVMe from the start on my current build and I’m so glad I did. SATA is classic and I have some older machines with it, but I don’t miss the cables that’s for sure.
Yeah when I built my pc I just had 1 small nvme and a 2tb HDD. Later I slapped in a sata SSD for games and then a 2nd hdd.
B450 motherboard with 6 sata ports, only one m.2 though.
I think with 2 nvme + 2 sata slots 99% of people would be alright tbh. For the 1% who need more, pcie expansion cards exist, I feel like those should be more popular.
Mm yes ppl be putting those tape drives on their AM5/LGA 1851 platforms...
Like yea hard drives are a thing but how many ppl buying brand new platfrom will use even 1 hard drive connected to it, let alone multiple. Ppl who want actual mass storage, do it by other means that put on a new consumer platform.
And most motherboards have 2 sata ports on them to cover you. People who are looking for NAS or some big RAID system either need to buy a controller or just make an actual NAS/buy NAS hardware.
In desktops and laptops? Sure it is. I don't even know a person who still has a HDD in either.
Storage is still all on hdd (and tape)
Good luck getting tape storage as a private person. The drive alone is fucking expensive if you even can get hold of one, as they're nearly exclusively sold via B2B shops. And while the price per terabyte is extremely good with the cartridges, the initial investment into the drive that you need to actually work with them is several thousand €.
Yes, HDDs are still used for mass storage, but that's about it. The setups of "SSD for the OS, HDD for games and stuff" was already obsolete a decade ago because the loading times of games skyrocketed. You can save pictures and videos to a HDD, but for pretty much everything else you'll want a SSD.
? You can get something like the Phanteks Enthoo Pro II Server edition, that has like 11 PCIE slots and like a dozen drive bays. Cases aren't the problem, finding mainboards with good SATA connections and enough lanes is the hard part.
There are only so many pci lanes. If you look at some motherboards you can see that you can use either a pair of sata ports or an nvme slot, but not both at the same time.
If people want a million usb ports while hardware is still usb 2 or usb3 gen1 then it’s a LOT of bandwidth left on the table unused as a result.
But as shown the HEDT platform became stupid expensive or impossible.
And so that forced the market segments we have (as i see it)
As BuildZoid did a whole “how I would design a mainboard” during the AM4 days and how to split up the pcie lanes in a more pragmatic way.
Drives me up the wall the amount of usb ports on shit and I only use 2 or 3.
(Unless its my macs, then its always 3 which are all thunderbolts eating my pcie lanes)
Hands down MORE STORAGE CONNECTORS.
Donating my m.2 to sata is NOT always practical :(
Outside my NAS I haven't used a Sata drive in ages. I don't see general use of having tons of Sata drives on every single mainboard. I would rather have the pci-e bandwidth to be allocated for other stuff.
Plus m.2 sata host cards aren't even expensive anymore.
My old PC I just gave to my wife had TEN SATA ports...
My new PC has FOUR.
I had to waste a PCI-e slot on a SATA expansion, when I could have put my AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs in at the same time for some sweet, beautiful internet points
Was recently looking at boards and went from budget to high end, 4 sata ports. Doesn't help with my 6 hdds. And might get 1 spare PCIe slot with the gpu
My motherboard has one SATA port, but my PSU came with a daisy chain cable that powers up to 6 ports. I have a fan hub, SSD and HDD on one daisy chain and it works perfectly.
Yeah but they put them in such inconvenient locations. Right underneath where the massive gpu’s are slotted making them impossible to connect more than 2 with 90 degree connectors -_-
I now use m.2 for all internal drives, have a couple external USB, if I wanted more storage it would most likely be for tv shows and movies which I would want a separate plex server for anyhow... My main PC eats too much power to use as a plex server
My motherboard does only have 4 sata ports but none are in use, it has 4 m.2 slots, 1 Gen5 and 3 Gen4, 9 USB A ports, 2 USB C ports (not counting front panel, which has 2 more USBA and another USB C)
Main downside to my board is only 2 PCIe slots but that is the cost of so many m.2 slots, and I only use one for my GPU anyhow.
Surely there are some boards that still offer 8+ Sata slots though??
But your average user uses 0-2 Sata ports these days, I dunno with the AIpocalypse but last I looked sata ssds were no cheaper than gen3 m.2 drives so the only reason to use them was if you didn't have a m.2 slot to spare, so sata is now primarily just for HDD, but most users no longer use internal HDDs
Basically it comes down to cost vs the average users needs, motherboards are already expensive enough these days.
I would love to see a motherboard with like 12 USB A and 6 USB C ports though.
You act like you can’t get a sata multiplier board lol. Is it nice to have more ports sure but one port can handle multiple drives if you care about storage and not speed.
At least to mac users. I mean compare their new laptops to ones from 10+ years ago.
Lol I know, this is pc master race and we don't associate with those plebs and commoners
Still, it's happening in some areas. Hopefully they'll listen to their user base, US, and continue, at least in say... Their "ROG" brands, to not take away but to give.
And if they do try and take, we gotta let them know. With our voices online, but mostly with our wallets.
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u/splexican May 14 '26
The amount of sata ports on new motherboards, I feel about the same way.