My mind forgot that M.2 is probably more prevalent these days and that they’re not just shutting down for no reason.

Is it though? Pretty much every single current-gen mainboard still comes with a number of SATA ports.

Everyone is going to buy M.2 SSDs first, and only buy SATA if they don’t have enough M.2 slots. I really doubt SATA SSDs are selling well. With that said, I don’t see SATA going anywhere. It’s (comparatively low) bandwidth means you can throw a few ports on your board and not sacrifice much. For some quick math: a M.2 port back-hauled by PCIe 4.0 x4 has 7.8 GB/s of data lines going to it. While SATA 6.0 has only 0.75GB/s of data lines going to it.

And how many motherboards have the same amount of m.2 slots as they do sata slots? And what generation? So now I need new ram which is inflated to high hell, a new motherboard and cpu to increase storage on my gaming rig? Its not like games are small these days I like to keep most games i have installed and that takes multiple terabytes of storage that is cheaper to do via sata ssds… this is clearly anti consumer and done purely to push people to newer systems in the hope people stay with windows instead of swapping to linux. Its being done to keep the ai bubble going…