It's been more than a decade; how much longer before
> The Next Great Solution renders it obsolescent?
Meh, we'll have to replace PCIe first. Remember that the interface (currently M.2) is basically "just" a direct PCIe x4 connection back to the CPU.
After that, it's just the integrated drive electronics that talk to the storage media itself (well via the NVMe driver, as opposed to the AHCI driver ala SATA).
It's PCI express on a different connector, it should be good for a while.
Intel will perhaps be releasing optical PC interconnect any year now, and soon after that there will be optical ram and storage. Once they figure out how to manufacture optical circuitboards.
Obviously you've never owned a laptop. M.2 is basically the standard connector for peripherals that were previously mini-pcie / mini-sata interfaces for harddrives, wifi, cellular modems, etc.
A desktop PC will likely only ever have one on the motherboard, maybe 2 if you get one with "integrated wifi", as I've seen some desktops have. But that's not exactly a problem -- bulk storage still works "fine" on "slow SATA drives". That being said, it's not like desktop motherboards are short of PCI slots -- just throw in a M.2 breakout and you can add a few more drives.
SATA works fine for SSD though. It's just that engineers went with a new non-backwards-compatible controller + drive electronics ("NVMe") instead of trying to make a SATA4 specification.
My point was that your assertion of "you don't see multiple M.2 cards in systems" is provably false, as all laptop expansion cards (NVMe, WiFi, cellular modem / WWAN adapter, etc.) utilize the M.2 interface.
Modern "high end" ASUS motherboard (i.e. shipping with PCIe 5.0, etc) on amazon shows five (5) M.2 slots, all capable of supporting NVMe SSD
*AND* 4 SATA ports.Thing is though, it's a hard sell to dump SATA ports. Mechanical drives are just so cheap compared to SSD.
It's still "M.2".
Except you can buy motherboards that support multiple NVMe drives. Still a bit on the bleeding edge (and expensive), but the option is there.
Laptop? Dude, you're moving the goalposts so hard you can't even keep your own scenarios straight.
Given that Backblaze is still putting out quarterly reports that primarily feature mechanical drives; seems that they're still the go-to for bulk storage.
You can't. They've got different keys.
Same as how DIMMs have different keying; or does that confuse you too?
Embedded? A PC motherboard is hardly an "embedded" device.
Hey, look at that, you asked about desktops.
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