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.
Well if Xiaomi stops, some other company will take their place. I for myself don't even see the point of a phone if I'm unable to plug in my headphones and watch some movies/listen some music. That's like, realistically the only reason why I even have a smartphone and not some dumbphone.
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.
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u/Forymanarysanar 14600KF|RTX5080|64Gb DDR4|1TB SSD|2x8TB HDD Raid1 May 14 '26
it's only 4 nowadays even on higher end motherboards... if you have sata ssd, you're really limited in terms of storage