I’ve been building PCs for 23 years now, with a large break until last year. PCs have changed.
External 5.25" and 3.5" slots which were very important for floppy, optical or tape, are basically legacy hardware in 2022. Internal slots for 2.5" and 3.5" to accommodate SSDs and HDDs are also still present in most modern PC cases.
There is no doubt that these external and internal slots are getting less, but rarely ever disappear all together. We’ve seen smaller and more airflow focused cases in return for those savings. But consumer products especially in the 3.5" HDD segment is really in decline and I don’t see SATA SSDs in the long term either.
But now we have everything screwed directly onto the motherboard via M.2. Board manufacturers must be kings of tetris to get up to 6x M.2 on a board. Sadly, smaller form factors really suffer from this, because they get less PCIe slots, less M.2, less of much else despite the chipset being fully capable of pushing out so much more. And M.2 is rather limited in drive capacity, people already use their PCIe slots to get more TBs of NVMe.
And then I was thinking about SAS 4.0. 24GBit/lane, can be used for SATA and NVMe, all with small slimSAS ports. Flexibility and ease of use can help both Desktop cases and smaller boards with keeping up with NVMe storage of today and tomorrow. U.2/U.3 form factor for the people, SATA ports on demand…luv it.
But U.2 was designed for enterprise! Well, M.2 was designed for low-power mobile applications. Most things don’t work as planned
Too expensive? I don’t know…but It’ll be damn nice to have. Or are smaller and cheaper cases without “traditional” 2.5"/3.5" bays the future of Desktop PCs?
There are some ITX-Server boards that are plastered with OCulink. Example
IF, and this is a big IF OCulink to PCIe riseres became readily available, PCs would gain a lot of flexibility in terms of component positioning.
Possibly.
Then again, storage demands for software is only going up (without that helping quality…)
I find this gap between workstations (aka HCI user device) and “office computers” to be quite big now. One is an 8 bay, 8x PCI monster. Next to it is an office box that can only hold two 2.5" SSDs, if the designer had not forgotten about the required cables…
Another thought:
What if, and this would SUCK massive bollocks, mobo manufacturers took a page out of notebook design 101 and included 256Gig directly on the back of the mainboard. Then two M.2 Slots (one for Wifi, one for Storage) would be enough.
With that space saving, the IDIOTIC 12VO standard could work without having to resurrect the Antec 302:
Yes, that is a fan mount behind the motherboard tray!
Yeah, there definitely is some polarization going on, from an all-purpose PC platform in the past, to (basically) immutable mini-pcs and still very flexible and expandable DIY desktops (but with declining market share).
That’s one of my fears. Soldered storage on boards you buy. We’ve seen those developments for NICs, Wifi/BT, Audio in the past, everything for reasonable cost saving considerations. Cost is always a thing, that’s why we’re left with crappy M.2 slots and E-ATX boards with only 3 PCIe slots. It’s really wierd. Server boards with 1-2x M.2 and Oculink/miniSAS is much more appealing to me, not from a platform view, but on general board design with flexibility and expansion in mind.
We’re now at a stage where some consumer boards are more expensive than server boards. Feature creep is real. I’d rather see some more additional PCIe slots with chipset lanes and less M.2+SATA port madness. OCulink/miniSAS is the way to go.
