Problem is that you only get pitiful amount of m2 slots in mainstream motherboards.

A lot of modern boards come with 3 or more - that's what mine has. And with modern density, that's a LOT of storage. I have two 4TB drives!

You could even get more using a PCIe NVME expansion card, since it's all over PCIe anyways.

Three is not pitiful. Three is plenty for mainstream use cases, which is what mainstream motherboards are designed for.

We used to have motherboards with six or twelve SATA ports. And SATA HDDs have way more capacity than the paltry (yet insanely expensive) options available with NVMe.

We used to want to connect SSDs, hard drives and optical drives, all to SATA ports. Now, mainstream PCs only need one type of internal drive. Hard drives and optical drives are solidly out of the mainstream and have been for quite a while, so it's natural that motherboards don't need as many ports.

> Now, mainstream PCs only need one type of internal drive

More so it would only need one drive. ODD is dead for at least 10 years and most people never need another internal drive at all.

Still use ODD for ripping... that said, I'm using a USB3 BRW drive and it's been fine for what I need.

I'm not even sure if CD/DVDs are selling anywhere. Sure, there are some niche shops out there, along with flea and retro markets but otherwise...

It's admittedly been harder than it used to be... I've been less inclined to buy CDs over just using streaming audio, since I pay for YouTube to go ad free, I use the music streaming kind of as a bonus.

On the Blu-ray front, I've tended to buy Blu-ray where available, but have bought DVD sets as well. There's also the high seas, so to speak for content that is not available for purchase/rent. I'd actually pay for a good AI upscaler software for DVD content if it worked under Linux (natively or via WINE). I left Windows outside of work a few years ago and not going back... I'm perfectly happy to pay for good, useful software even if I'm more inclined to look for open-source solutions first.

This article is talking about SATA SSDs, not HDDs. While the NVMe spec does allow for MVMe HDDs, it seems silly to waste even one PCIe lane on a HDD. SATA HDDs continue to make sense.

And I'm saying assuming that m.2 slots are sufficient to replace SATA is folly because it is only talking about SSDs.

And SATA SSDs do make sense, they are significantly more cost effective than NVMe and trivial to expand. Compare the simplicity, ease, and cost of building an array/pool of many disks comprised of either 2.5" SATA SSDs or M.2 NVMe and get back to me when you have a solution that can scale to 8, 14, or 60 disks as easily and cheaply as the SATA option can. There are many cases where the performance of SSDs going over ACHI (or SAS) is plenty and you don't need to pay the cost of going to full-on PCIe lanes per disk.

> And SATA SSDs do make sense, they are significantly more cost effective than NVMe

That doesn't seem to be what the vendors think, and they're probably in a better position to know what's selling well and how much it costs to build.

We're probably reaching the point where the up-front costs of qualifying new NAND with old SATA SSD controllers and updating the firmware to properly manage the new NAND is a cost that cannot be recouped by a year or two of sales of an updated SATA SSD.

SATA SSDs are a technological dead end that's no longer economically important for consumer storage or large scale datacenter deployments. The one remaining niche you've pointed to (low-performance storage servers) is not a large enough market to sustain anything like the product ecosystem that existed a decade ago for SATA SSDs.

its not enough if you have four ssds each with 4tb for instance

Is it not fair to say 4x4 TB SSD is an example of at least a prosumer use case (barrier there is more like ~10 before needing workstation/server gear)? Joe Schmoe is doing on the better half of Steam gamers if he's rocking a 1x2 TB SSD as his primary drive.

On top of what the others have said, any faster interface you replace SATA with will have the same problem set because it's rooted in the total bandwidth to the CPU, not the form factor of the slot.

E.g. going to the suggested U.2 is still going to net you looking for the PCIe lanes to be available for it.

My desktop motherboard has 4... not sure how many you need, even if 8tb drives are pretty pricey. Though actual PCIe lanes in consumer CPUs are limited. If you bump up to ThreadRipper, you can use PCIe to M.2 adapters to add lots of drives.

The MSI motherboard I use has 3, and with the PCIe expansion card installed, I have 7 m.2's. There are some expansion cards with 8 m.2 slots. You can also get SATA to m.2 devices, or my fav is USB-c drives that hold 2 m.2. Getting great speeds from that little device.

Most consumer motherboards have 2-3 M.2 slots.

You can buy cheap add-in cards to use PCIe slots as M.2 slots, too.

If you need even more slots, there are add-in cards with PCIe switches which allow you to install 10+ M.2 drives into a single M.2 slot.