Do motherboards with 8 satas still exist for a reasonable price?

Nah the sata was sata. The other bit was a pcie lane. Drop the sata, keep the pcie and you've got nvme on a cable.

https://pinoutguide.com/HD/SATA_Express_pinout.shtml

 

If it's for a NAS older A88X boards can have up to 8 sata ports.
Using one as a backup server/media player.
Do you want to game on it as well? What's it's purpose?

 

So basically, U.2 then? Looks like they've pinched SAS connectors at each end of the cables, but its PCIe over the wires. You can even get U.2 to PCIe slot converters

If I'm reading that right, the PCIe lanes travel over the SATA wires. The extra connector is just for juju juice.

Just noticed that the ROG Dominus only has 8 SATA (two of which are thanks to an Asmedia controller, only 6 on the chipset). Needs two PSU's and supports quad SLI but only 8 sata .

 

the pin out shows the pcie lanes on the sata ports.

which is a given, as that's how sata works on all modern platform hubs, each sata port is an internal pcie 1x lane.

 

Hmm. Looks like I read it wrong.

I thought the sata was there to detect and hand over to pcie. Which may be true, but it is still on the same cable.

Anyhow, think it'll make a comeback in a different form?

 

No. Sata Express is dead in the water. NVME m.2's have made it a dinosaur before it even managed to get any traction. It surprises me that some boards still have it at all. There are very few devices that even use it AFAIK, and there will be even less in times to come.

A PCIE4 M.2 is so much more convenient and so much faster that Sata Express has literally no advantages at all.

U2 is also dead in the water IMHO. There may be outlier uses, perhaps in the enterprise market, IDK, but certainly for most consumers both protocols are not competitive.

To answer the original question, Asrock Taichi's of any flavour - X470, X570, Z370, Z390 - all come with 8X Sata ports. I'm pretty sure that none of those boards support Sata Express either. A good thing IMHO, its just wasted resources which are far better off being used by more Sata ports.

 

M2 is great. But cables are always going to be much easier to add 8 of.

 

Nope. Dead duck that didn't even get a dead cat bounce off the ground. Plus AFIK it was only certified for PCIe2 2x. That's 1/4 of M.2 & U.2's PCIe3 4x.

M.2 will rule for pure volume - you find the same drives in laptops and desktops so it's one less SKU branch that needs to be accounted for. It's going to be interesting to see how the mobile world balances the desire for speed against the massive thermal load of the top performers.

U.2 will persevere purely on it's enterprise underpinnings and its established versatility as an external/addon PCIe slot capability. It's biggest advantage is truly humongous SSDs in a 3.5" format with integrated heat sinking - 15TB NVMe SSD @ 3.5GB/s read & write anyone?. U.2 should take over from 12Gbps SAS for small scale deployments since it damn near doubles the interface performance.

With drives routinely heading into the >10TiB (and if Seagate finally gets HAMR working right, >20TiB) ranges; those of us that want to plug in 8 (or y'know 22) hard drives at home are very much a percentage of a percentage use case that will be ignored by most consumer line manufacturers. Even cases these days are coming with fewer and fewer places to put hard drives. 1999/2000 Lian Li PC60 - 8x 3.5" bays, 4x 5.25". Fast forward to 2019 and 2 3.5" is common, with another 2 to 4 for 2.5" SSDs and zero 5.25". Pesky hard drives get in the way of vertical GPU mounting and radiators (weeee AIOs!), plus all those cables look ugly, so we'll hide them and only have a couple...

 

But they're one in the same electrically, you can have 1 sata express or 2 sata, if you remove that sata express you also remove two sata. i doubt the connector costs much more to implement and it's an added feature, but not like it's used anymore. My ITX board has one, I see it as a much more sturdy pair of sata ports

 

Noticed this today while trawling PCCG.
2x SATA M.2 via standard SATA cables, 1x PCIe3 x4 NVME via U.2. All in a 3.5" bay...
https://www.pccasegear.com/products/45150/silverstone-sdp12-3-5in-m-2-sata-nvme-drive-mount

 

In short yes, but they are few and far between.
AMD has been pretty good but the average is 4-6 SATA3 ports and a pair or trio of M.2 slots depending on chipset. ASROCK are pretty good for all that but even they're moving with the market design trends.

last 8-10 or 12 port designs i saw were either NAS style Atom/Ryzen embedded or X4/570 and maybe TR4 socket boards.

 

Any Asrock Taichi has 8 Sata ports.

 

Keep in mind using the M.2 slots will prevent using certain Sata slots.

 

It may be different on other models, but on the X470 Taichi at least there are 6 Sata ports on the chipset and an additional 2 on the Asmedia controller.

Using the second M.2 slot will disable PCIE5, but not any of the SATA ports. I actually currently have both M.2 slots on my X470 occupied with NVME drives AND all 8 SATA ports with SATA drives, as I've been backing up my library over the last couple days.

With the additional bandwidth of the X570, I can't see why that would change either.

Dunno about the Intel boards though.