On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 10:58:38PM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
So people are supposed to discard or replace their older external devices just because something else came along that may or may not actually be as well suited to task?
Basically, yes. If I'm provisioning a new system, it seems stupid to build it around 10 year old storage media which is much closer to the end of its operational life than the beginning. It's just not rational to choose an option which has a higher failure rate, lower speed, higher cost per megabyte, etc., outside of extremely specialized requirements. You might not have noticed, but SATA basically stopped evolving a decade ago. The last attempt to really move SATA forward was SATA express, which was DOA and (AFAIK) never implemented on the drive side. There have been a few tweaks to the SATA standard since then, but it's effectively in legacy mode. Why? Because NVMe makes much more sense for modern storage media, and SATA's attempt to play in that space (SATA express) was already too slow and too late a decade ago. So if you buy something today it's going to be either slow/archival/cheap SATA or M.2/U.2 NVMe. When SATA stopped evolving, it made no more sense to keep eSATA going and now USB/thunderbolt are much faster as well as being more universal and having more functionality. The reason you don't see motherboards with 10 different kinds of ports on the back is that the couple of ports that remain do everything the old ones did, but faster and cheaper (by reducing BOM).
Anyway, if you've got some sort of niche requirement like eSATA or firewire, get an adapter. An internal/external sata converter is literally a couple of bucks. In the context of the thread, there's still an existing system that's working fine, so keeping legacy devices on there is also an option. If you're determined that you need every obsolete interface (plus, presumably, new interfaces) built in to a new motherboard that's certainly your right, but you're really limiting your options and honestly showing signs of being an IT hoarder.
Obsolete, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder/user. I want my external disks on the same bus as my internal disks, not the USB bus, which when used for disks too commonly results in musical device names, and reboots that need to be redone because of a USB stick that failed to get removed first.
Who cares what the device names are? If you're hard coding device names instead of something intrinsic to the media it's a self-inflicted wound.
I still prefer floppies
That's frankly nuts--floppies were slow and unreliable 25 years ago and haven't improved with age. If you value nostalgia over any rational criteria that's fine for you, but they aren't relevant to most of humanity.