I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed. The SATA SSD market has basically turned into a dumping ground for low quality flash and controllers, with the 870s being the only consistently good drives still in production after Crucial discontinued the MX500.
If you care even remotely about speed, you'll get an NVMe drive. If you're a data hoarder who wants to connect 50 drives, you'll go for spinning rust. Enterprise will go for U.3.
So what's left? An upgrade for grandma's 15-year-old desktop? A borderline-scammy pre-built machine where the listed spec is "1TB SSD" and they used the absolute cheapest drive they can find? Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?
Cheaper, sturdier, and more easily swappable than NVME while still being far faster than spinning discs.
I use them basically as independent cartridges, this one's work, that one's a couple TB of raw video files plus the associated editor project, that one has games and movies. I can confidently travel with 3-4 unprotected in my bag.
There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.
Did that for a while until I invested in a NAS... at that point those early SSDs became drives for my RPi projects, which worked well enough until I gave all my RPi hardware away earlier this year... those 12+yo SSD drives still running without issue.
Where do you add more storage after you've used your 1-2 nvme slots and the m.2?
I would think an SSD is going to be better than a spinning disc even with the limits of sata if you want to archive things or work with larger data or whatever
4 M.2 NVMe drives is quite doable, and you can put 8TB drives in each. There are very few people who need more than 32TB of fast data access, who aren't going to invest in enterprise hardware instead.
Pre-hype, for bulk storage SSDs are around $70/TB, whereas spinning drives are around $17/TB. Are you really willing to pay that much more for slightly higher speeds on that once-per-month access to archived data?
In reality you're probably going to end up with a 4TB NVMe drive or two for working data, and a bunch of 20TB+ spinning drives for your data archive.
You can actually get a decent 4TB USB-C drive from Samsung. For most home users those are fast and big enough. If you get a mac, the SSD is soldered on the main board typically. And you can get up to 8TB now. That's a trend that some other laptop builders are probably following. There's no need for separate SATA drives anymore except for a shrinking group of enthusiast home builders.
I have a couple of 2TB USB-C SSDs. I haven't bought a separate SATA drive in well over a decade. My last home built PC broke around 2013.
Only SATA made it common for motherboards or adapters to support more than 2-4 hard drives. We're back to what we used to do before SATA: when you're out of space you replace the smallest drive with something larger.
Link? An adapter allowing a M.2 SATA SSD to be used in a 2.5" SATA enclosure is cheap and dead simple: just needs a 5V to 3.3V regulator. But that doesn't help. Connecting a M.2 NVMe SSD to a SATA host port would be much more exotic, and I don't recall ever hearing about someone producing the silicon necessary to make that work.
Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche.
I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be replaced without opening the machine, too, which is a major win - every time you pull the machine out on its rails and pop the top is another opportunity for cables to come out or other things to go wrong.
M.2 boot drives for servers have been popular for years. There's a whole product segment of server boot drives that are relatively low capacity, sometimes even using the consumer form factor (80mm long instead of 110mm) but still including power loss protection. Marvell even made a hardware RAID0/1 controller for NVMe specifically to handle this use case. Nobody's adding a SAS HBA to a server that didn't already need one, and nobody's making any cheap low-port-count SAS HBAs.
Anything later than and including x4x has M.2 BOSS support and in 2026 you shouldn't buy anything lower than 14th gen. But yes, cheap SSDs serve well as the ESXi boot drives.
I bought 2 of the 870 QVOs a few years ago and put them in software RAID 0 for my steam library. They cost significantly less per TB than the M.2 drives at the time.
Only if the adapter is active; passive ones just tell the GPU to switch protocols to HDMI or whatever, so those are still kneecapped by driver limitations.
Edit: I just checked Amazon and active adapters are a lot cheaper (and less niche) than they used to be, though there are still some annoying results like a passive adapter which has an LED to indicate the connection is "active" being the first result for "DP to HDMI 2.1 active".
I suspect that this is due to the elimination of toll shopping/avoidance. Per [0] and [1], the only way to avoid a toll entirely is to drive from the West Side Highway or FDR Drive to the Brooklyn Bridge, but commercial vehicles are prohibited on FDR Drive and the Brooklyn Bridge has weight restrictions [2], so heavy trucks don't have a legal way to dodge the tolls anymore.
If you need to reach Long Island, the incentive to avoid the (tolled) Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Verrazzano, and RFK bridges are gone; now you're paying for the privilege of sitting in Manhattan traffic.
>Fewer cars in general is the win from congestion pricing, though.
And lower VMTs (vehicle miles traveled) is also a win for the planet, it's probably the best weapon the average person has access to in the fight against climate change. Transit usage begets transit usage; more fares paid to the agency enables better frequencies and more routes, leading to more people opting to take transit instead of driving... In a well-run system, it's a positive feedback loop (and the inverse, where people stop taking transit, can also lead to a death spiral, as happened across America in the mid-20th century).
If you substitute with “don’t travel far [or at all]”, it’s a big savings. If you substitute flying 1000 miles on an airliner with “drive 1000 miles instead”, or flying US to Europe with a cruise ship trip to Europe, you’ve probably made it worse; in that regards, it’s less the mode of travel and more the total distance in these trades.
The observation that stuck with me is how much of my county's total carbon emissions are due to air travel which begins/ends at our regional airports (~3%), vs what percentage of the population flies in a given year.
The distribution of air-travel emissions, to me, seem pretty gross when juxtaposed with the number of people who are doing this travel. The incentives for business travel, in particular, seem misaligned.
I don't think you can just look at the "number of people who are doing this travel", as those same planes are also carrying air cargo and US mail. Not everyone flies, but almost everyone in the county receives mail, cargo, or benefits from same. (It would be easier to replace cargo than passenger transport with a more efficient and comparable total trip time mode of transport if such was available.)
The reason you get asked whether your USPS parcel contains hazardous substances X, Y, and Z and why the fines for violations are so stiff is partly because of passenger airline safety concerns.
Rail transit in the north east is the best in the US. But it is terrible in many ways. As someone who lives in an area that would be marginal for rail even in the great rail countries of Europe of Asia I really need the north east to develop great rail - only by bringing great rail to places where it is easy can we possibly get it good enough that it would be worth bringing to me. Instead I just get examples of why we shouldn't bother with transit at all here: when all we can see is the stupid things New York is constantly doing to transit (where the density is so high they can get by with it) there isn't an example I can point to of that would be worth doing here.
My grocery store's website (Jewel-Osco) doesn't even work on Firefox; searching for anything just gives me a loading screen that never goes away, even on a brand new profile with all cookies accepted and no adblocker or other extensions. On Chrome it works, but it's comically slow, and the mobile app is somehow even worse.
The really confusing part is the parent company's website (Albertsons) works just fine, though it is also slow.
Kudos for all the "smart" managers that throw direct sales away so they can spy on the more price-sensitive people that endure a bad experience in exchange for discounts or not owning a car.
It happens on so many kinds of store, it's baffling.
Not really, that's just basic access control. If you've used Colab or Cloud Shell (or even just Google Cloud in general, given the need to explicitly allow the usage of each service), it's not surprising at all.
Why does AI studio need access to my drive in order to run someone else's prompt? It's not a prompt for authentication with my Google account. I'm already signed in. It's prompting for what appears to be full read/write access to my drive account. No thanks.
It does have IR tracking, so presumably it could be made compatible with lighthouses, but if they don't make it compatible (and currently the page makes no mention of it) I don't know how well it could track objects out of frame considering the cameras are still mounted on the headset.
The controllers also have gyros, but from what I've read dead reckoning from gyros small enough for mobile devices really isn't reliable for extended periods.
The controllers won't have lighthouse tracking though. The IR tracking is the headset tracking the controller's IR LEDs, which the Index controllers do not have. It might be possible to have the headset IR track the lighthouses, and then use the old Index controllers, which also track the lighthouses.
There's also tools to calibrate the different tracking methods together, but that seems less than ideal.
Good catch, I just saw IR tracking on the page and didn't investigate further. I can't wait to see some teardowns (physical and firmware) of the device, then we can get a better look at what it is truly capable of.
Though it wouldn't help the controllers, perhaps the expansion port on the headset could be used for a lighthouse-compatible tracker? (One can dream...)
As someone who bought the original Steam Controller, I'm very excited it's finally getting a successor, especially since it supports Bluetooth. It is always annoying having to move my USB dongle between my desktop and my Steam Link whenever I want to change where I am playing from.
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