Sata Connector Stack (3 stack?)

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Neapolitan6th

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 18, 2016
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I was thinking of ways to make motherboards more feature rich without occuping more motherboard space, and I wondered why the traditional double stack of sata ports was not stacked even higher.

For example why don't motherboard manufactuers attempt tripple or even quadruple stacks of sata ports on motherboards?

These days we are seeing 4 ports pretty standard on itx motherboard and it doesn't make sense to me why they couldn't stack more sata ports to at least have 6 slots.
 
You're right they would interfere with normal ATX and mATX designs.

I suppose I was considering ITX as the main application. Since the sata slots are above the single pcie slot, they would not interfere.

Only concern would be if such a design interfere with cpu air cooler compatibility.

With people gravitating to larger ITX cases these days, it'd be nice to have more sata slots if possible.
 
Here are the reasons I can think that they will never do this.

1. Easier to break the "stack" off the motherboard
2. wiring traces on the motherboard - everything is set to be the optimal trace length in order to optimize speed and stability. When you add more traces to almost the same exact place, the complexity of doing this is going to skyrocket. Ever notice the little squiggly lines on motherboards or add-in cards or other electronics for that matter? It is because in order to stay within spec, they must make the trace lengths pretty much the same exact length for certain things to actually work properly.
 
Thanks for the reply. That makes a lot of sense. Why overcomplicate something when you don't have to.
 
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