Is there a reason why Sata have dropped to 4 ports across all venders for x870?
Posted by SinisterSh0t@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 19 comments
Been planning to upgrade my rig from 2017 as the intel 7700k is definitely showing its age. Though I still think my 1080ti has some life in it for a few more years. Was planning to get a Ryzen 9800x3D and either an RTX 4000 or 5000 series card?
I’ve been considering plans for a major overhaul for while now, even playing around with pc part picker with its builder tool. The idea I had settled on was getting a Lian Li O11 Evo XL Case so I could have plenty of storage while also having the space for the larger GPU’s of today.
Was going to get 4 Hard Drives of 4TB and turn them into 2 sets of RAID 1 configurations, with one set being for work and the other for personal files. Then I was going to get a Sata SSD 4TB for gaming, alongside a 2TB NVME for Favourite Games, and finally a 1TB NVME for OS. With one Sata port left for another SSD in a few years time.
But I’ve been looking the x870 chipset and it looks like no vender whether that be Asus, Gigabyte, Msi, etc. has no more than 4 Sata ports When for the longest time it’s been 6 on these motherboard lineups. Why? Is it because they choose a lower costing controller for their boards? Or is Sata truly beginning to be phased out after all these years?
Is there any x870 motherboard out there I don’t know about that has 6 Sata ports, or would it just be easier to go for the previous x670 lineups?
onlyYGO@reddit
Because. its overkill. even 4 sata ports is overkill imo...
take a look at the first x870 that came up on my google search for "x870" the MAG X870 TOMAHAWK WIFI
it literally comes with
With that, lets assume someone will be using this specific station for gaming AND work. so the pcie 5.0 x16 slot will be used for GPU. that still leaves with 2x pcie slot
4x M.2 (some restrictions. but still all will work at respectable speeds)
and it still has 4x SATA
not many people will need it all.
kadajawi@reddit
I have 4 SATA drives in my desktop and 19 in my NAS. I disagree, 4 SATA ports are not overkill.
Merranza@reddit
The Tomahawk is one of the most underrated motherboard in the x870 and X870E lineup (aside from BIOS problems right now).
MSI allows a rerouting of 4 lanes that makes it the ONLY motherboard with the X870E Godlike to give full PCIe 5X16 + 2 5x4 M.2 drives. To do so, you only have to go in the BIOS and disable the USB 40Gbps to allocate the full 4 lanes (usually shared with the 5x4 M.2_2 slot).
All other 800 series motherboards are limited to PCIe 5x16 + 1 5x4 M.2. If you want a second one, you will have to share lanes and usually, PCIe 5x16 drops to 5x8.
Yes, 5x4 M.2 drives are still recent, overkill and generate a lot of heat. But they will soon become much more affordable and technology will stabilize.
I have absolutely no idea why they didn't allow this on the X870E Carbon on top of it. If they did and went full marketing about it, I'm pretty sure MSI would dominate the 800 market right now.
SinisterSh0t@reddit (OP)
I guess that makes sense, It's just the cost of Multiple SSD's particularly NVME is kind of high for large capacities.
And across the hard drives of my old PC I've got about 7TB worth of work and personal stuff, that's excluding gaming which I have on a separate HDD and my old 512gb Samsung 960Pro SSD which is for OS.
onlyYGO@reddit
you're doing this in a very optimized/inefficient way. and its cheaper to get a bigger drive than a smaller drive.
chineke14@reddit
As someone who has 4xHDDs and 2xSata SSDs, I'll stick with Intel then until the dude this retarded crap. SATA ports costs nothing. SSDs are still expensive AF per TB. I didn't realize I was in such a "minority".
ZakinKazamma@reddit
Also just as a note because I didn't see it mentioned, you can use a breakout cable off an M.2 slot that'll convert to I believe at least 4 SATA if not more. Many motherboards have two M.2 slots lately, and I feel like many tend to only use one slot. As well as converting a PCI-E x1 to a SATA hub is reasonably cheap now a days.
613_detailer@reddit
Probably easier to just use a $15 PCIe 1x SATA expansion card, and it won’t cost you a m.2 slot.
SinisterSh0t@reddit (OP)
Interesting, Never considered that option before. I'll look into it, thank you.
DonTaddeo@reddit
Around here, SATA drives cost noticeably more than M2 drives and one sees relatively few sales on them.
Not sure about the x870 chiposet, but a lot of earlier motherboards with 6 SATA ports used an unexceptional third party SATA interface chip for 2 of the ports and using those ports disabled a PCIe or M2 slot.
DonTaddeo@reddit
I would also add that a lot of cases I've seen in recent times have arrangements for 3.5 inch disks that seem to be more of an afterthought than anything else and make access to the power supply connectors awkward.
Robot_Graffiti@reddit
Now that NVME is cool and games coming on DVD-ROM is incredibly retro, casual computer users are able to play Fortnite and do their taxes with zero SATA ports. Needing more than one SATA port is for nerds.
(I'm a nerd and I'm only using three SATA SSDs and an NVME - I don't see myself using more drives unless I get really into data hoarding)
Philluminati@reddit
Don’t quote me but it maybe because 870 boards support USB 4(?) or USB C at 40gb/s which drains the fast motherboard buses for other internal connectors. I don’t know if that’s right but I thought I saw a mobo review along those lines talking about how you can’t run two GPUs in modern machines like you used to, due to the same general issue.
onlyYGO@reddit
you are right. alot of x870 reference USB C 40gpbs as sharing bandwidth. idk if this is a coincidence (as im not a mobo reviewer or anything. i just go day by day) or not. but yes to your excerpt on x870s
EitherMeaning8301@reddit
I'm not an expert on this one, but you also potentially have the option of adding a SATA expander card in an open PCIe slot.
The trend of late has been to prioritize M.2 slots and high-speed USB connections, which means the "legacy" SATA connections get sacrificed, just like you'd be hard-pressed to get VGA or DVI connections.
There's only so much connectivity to go around, and the days of piling spinning hard drives on top of each other are gone.
Then again, I have no idea why the hell modern PSUs still ship with Berg connectors. The ribbon data cables used for the floppys have been obsolete for over twenty years, and it's been forever since you had something to plug them into.
VoraciousGorak@reddit
This. SATA SSDs are broadly leaving production, and mechanical hard drives are more relegated to the dedicated server/NAS build. If your data is important enough to need backup, then don't just trust it to two hard drives in one Windows PC; that provides no actual redundancy and no backup, it only protects against one whole-drive failure.
drewts86@reddit
u/SinisterSh0t listen to this guy - RAID is for uptime, not for backup. If your rig takes a shot you could potentially lose all 4 drives. Your backup goes in a 2nd machine. If you don’t want to run a whole 2nd computer just get an external and back it up to that.
Also, instead of 4 drives you can just run 2 x 8TB (1 as primary and 1 as backup) and just partition it into 2 4TB volumes if you need them separated.
everydae24@reddit
It's actually AMD's decision to put 4 SATA ports on a single Promontory 21 chipset, so X870 with one Promontory 21 supports 4 max natively. Anything more than that must come from the third party SATA controller add-on, which I am sure most of the board manufacturers bother considering the drop in SATA popularity.
X670/X670E/X870E with two Promontory 21s on the other hand do support up to 8 devices, 4 from each chipset. But it's up to the board manufacturer how many they actually put.
jfriend00@reddit
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