[wao0uuno]

>Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures.

That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data.

>The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.

That's true and very unfortunate.

[Koshkin]

> buying a single large capacity drive

Now that's a terrible idea. You shouldn't trust any single device with terabytes of your data, regardless of whether it is low-cost or Chinese.

[MrDrMcCoy]

I will not miss the awful, half-duplex protocol that never should have won over SAS. I just wish that PCIe switches and cheaper eMMC/UFS flash on M.2 were available for more flexible and cost effective storage options.

[wao0uuno]

Yeah, the problem is most consumer motherboards don't come with that many PCIe lanes. Building storage servers for home use with M.2 SSDs is just not feasible.

[MrDrMcCoy]

PCIe is a switched protocol. We ought to have had better options to make better use of the limited lanes by now. There are a few cards with switches that can give you multiple M.2 slots on x4, but that's only with gen3, which the latest GPUs won't init on, and trying to cable that is hell. Better PCIe switch options for external enclosures exist, but aren't available to mortals that I've seen.