When will motherboards drop SATA ports?

[Quartz]

Space on motherboards is precious and NVME / M.2 drives require a lot. SATA is old tech, so why not just drop the SATA ports on the motherboard and supply an add-in SATA card for one of the x1 or x4 slots instead? Or even an adapter for one of the M.2 slots.

When do you think this will happen?

I think it will take some generations. Board manufacturers have been very conservative to date and were slow to drop PATA / IDE drive and even the FDD port (SCSI, MFM, and RLL controllers were typically on add-in cards).

 

[Semple]

Maybe another 10 years.

Considering mechanical hard drives are still very widely sold, and the primary interface is SATA, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

USB C has been widely available for the last 4-5 years, and that's still not being fitted as standard to all motherboards.

 

[SKILL]

I think we'll see SATA ports on motherboards for a very long time to come, M2/SSD's in general are still comfortably more expensive than mechanical HDD's so can't compete for raw storage and I don't think they'll change from SATA.

We might see less, 2-4 rather than 6-8 perhaps. But even if you take a board with 8 SATA ports, and even if they were all inline on the motherboard (they often aren't, the small form factor means they can be spread out wherever there's space, unlike M2), that probably wouldn't free up enough space for a full 22110 M2 slot.

A vertical mounting system for M2 seems like it would make more sense? Even a basic PCIe 16x slot could give full bandwidth to 4x M2 PCIe cards, taking up far less motherboard space than the M2 cards.