[pdimitar]

As @wtallis already said, a lot of external USB stuff is just unreliable.

Right now I am overlooking my display and seeing 4 different USB-A hubs and 3 different enclosures that I am not sure what to do with (likely can't even sell them, they'd go for like 10-20 EUR and deliveries go for 5 EUR so why bother; I'll likely just dump them at one point). _All_ of them were marketed as 24/7, not needing cooling etc. _All_ of them could not last two hours of constant hammering and it was not even a load at 100% of the bus; more like 60-70%. All began disappearing and reappearing every few minutes (I am presuming after overheating subsided).

Additionally, for my future workstation at least I want everything inside. If I get an [e]ATX motherboard and the PC case for it then it would feel like a half-solution if I then have to stack a few drives or NAS-like enclosures at the side. And yeah I don't have a huge villa. Desk space can become a problem and I don't have cabinets or closets / storerooms either.

SATA SSDs fill a very valid niche to this day: quieter and less power-hungry and smaller NAS-like machines. Sure, not mainstream, I get how giants like Samsung think, but to claim they are no longer desirable tech like many in this thread do is a bit misinformed.

[saltcured]

I recognize the value in some kind of internal expansion once you are talking about an ATX or even uATX board and a desktop chassis. I just wonder if the USB protocol can be hardened for this using some appropriate internal cabling. Is it an intrinsic problem with the controllers and protocol, or more related to the cheap external parts aimed at consumers?

Once you get to uATX and larger, this could potentially be via a PCIe adapter card too, right? For an SSD scenario, I think some multiplexer card full of NVMe M.2 slots makes more sense than trying to stick to an HDD array physical form factor. I think this would effectively be a PCIe switch?

I've used LSI MegaRAID cards in the past to add a bunch of ports to a PC. I combined this with a 5-in-3 disk subsystem in a desktop PC. This is where the old 3x 5.25" drive bay space could be occupied by one subsystem with 5x 3.5" HDD hot-swap trays. I even found out how to re-flash such a card to convert it from RAID to a basic SATA/SAS expander for JBOD service, since I wanted to use OS-based software RAID concepts instead.

[pdimitar]

> I just wonder if the USB protocol can be hardened for this using some appropriate internal cabling

Honestly no idea. Should be doable but with personal computing being attacked every year, I would not hold my breath.

> Once you get to uATX and larger, this could potentially be via a PCIe adapter card too, right?

Sure, but then you have to budget your PCIe lanes. And once you get to a certain scale (a very small one in fact) then you have to consider getting a Threadripper board + CPU, and that increases the expense anywhere from 3x to 8x.

I thought about it lately and honestly it's either a Threadripper workstation with all the huge expenses that entails, or I'd probably just settle for an ITX form factor, cram it with 2-3 huge NVMe SSDs (8TB each), have a really good GPU and quiet cooling... and just expand horizontally if I ever need anything else (and make VERY sure it has at least two USB 4 / Thunderbolt ports that don't gimp the bandwidth to your SSDs or GPU so the expansion would be at 100% capacity).

Meaning that going for a classic PC does not makes sense if you want an internally expandable workstation. What's the point in a consumer board + a Ryzen 9950X and a big normal PC case if I can't put more than two old-school HDDs in there? Just to have a better airflow? Meh. I can put 2-3 Noctua coolers in an ITX case and it might even be quieter.