Week 2

This week I would like to talk about how glad I am that motherboard manufacturers figured out that M.2 ports were better suited being placed parallel to the motherboard rather than perpendicular as was shown in the video posted by JayzTwoCents seen here: https://youtu.be/ZnaQyGAg8Eg?t=638.

I’m not quite sure if the entire perpendicular M.2 slots have gone by the wayside as I still see people talking about it as early as a year ago (see this reddit post about someone being concerned about mounting their SSD in the perpendicular M.2 slot) https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1b2wg5w/my_perpendicular_m2_port_is_causing_me_anxiety/ but that could be an old motherboard in all fairness.

Regardless, I remember when the M.2 standard started to make its way to mainstream motherboards and I remember seeing the vertical slots and thinking: “Does the drive just slot into the motherboard like that without any sort of bracket? Won’t that create so much unnecessary torque on the motherboard/drive if something were to snag the drive? That would almost certainly destroy the drive or slot, I’m never going to use that.” In all fairness, it does look like there are two screw holes on either side of the perpendicular M.2 slots, which are likely used for a bracket to make the M.2 Drive much more secure, but even that bracket being snagged by something could cause a lot of damage to the motherboard, and because of that, I still disagree with it.

The other M.2 positioning I disagree with are motherboards that have the parallel M.2 slots, but the drive is pointing away from the motherboard and floating off the side. (As in the below photo I took of our work desktop computers).

Not only does this add an extra step if you’re planning to remove the motherboard from the case, it also prevents this motherboard from being used in any other standardized computer cases (not that that’s the only reason this motherboard wouldn’t fit in another case: see last image.) and makes running the computer in a test-bench scenario more difficult and dangerous as there is no way to secure the drive to the motherboard.



M.2 Drive floating off the side of the motherboard secured to the case. 



Bonus: What the heck is this motherboard size/layout? Why couldn't they just use a standard motherboard size and create a daughterboard for the front panel I/O like everyone else? This case, and almost everything inside it will become e-waste the second this motherboard ever dies. 

 

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