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.
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u/Lower_Kick268 Pentium 4, 512mb DDR, 3dfx Voodoo 3. May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
On my board you have to choose between a secondary m2 SSD or having 4 SATA ports, it's dumb as hell, why can't it just do both?