Thread by @gravislizard

a hill I will die on: the SATA plug is a board-mount connector intended for PCB-to-PCB interconnects. it was not meant to be put on cables, and SATA cables are as unnatural as those PCI-E extensions people use for bi tcoin miners

using a SATA cable is like plugging a USB sound card that weighs like six ounces into a horizontal USB port so as soon as you let go you see it sag and bend the wafer to its limit

there's, what, 35 years of custom PC cases? from anonymous chinese factories using tired old molds to named designers making boutique shit with custom displays at best buy. a bunch of shit has improved.

everything but the lowest end has big improvements. they roll over the sheet metal now so it's not sharp. front panel ports aren't flimsy. the 5.25" bay knockouts became quick release, and then went away when people stopped using those instead of sticking around as dead weight

you can spend, what, $700 on a case? *just* a case. and it has no drive backplane. it's a bizarre and POINTLESS thing to leave out. the spec is absolutely designed for this and every single server uses backplanes because it's *obviously* the right way to do it.

it's, what, a buck of PCB? chinese factories will make five-layer boards for a laugh, HP will engineer a full motherboard that they use in a single model for six months, but nobody will make a *two layer* board to connect your hard drives without awful flimsy cables.

it is, in no uncertain terms, trivial to solve this, and there's no downside. none. there's *no downside whatsoever.* using cables with drives is absolutely pointless, confers no benefit.

I've been mad about this since 2006. It just doesn't make sense that nobody does it. It's a value-add. Whoever did it first would take over the market for custom cases overnight, and it's laughably inexpensive. It's just BAFFLING.

thermaltake made a case with backplane slots!!! except what's this? they're all little baby PCBs and cables STILL have to be stuffed in between them and the case side, so they're under constant strain and trying to snap themselves off of the interposer board. GREAT!

this is so easy to do right! this is fucking trivial!
you make a board that hangs behind the drive bays and has fixed connectors
the board extends out from behind the cage
it accepts a fat power input from the PSU and jumpers go to the motherboard

why do i know this? because there are thousands and thousands of servers that do it. here's the machine i almost bought - the front has 24 drive bays, and they just have cables on the back that plug into ordinary SATA ports on the controller card.

this machine has unusual needs hence the controller card, but you can just swing those cables over and plug them into the motherboard if you like. there's nothing stopping this from being done in a consumer PC

the way it's done now is primarily with "rotated" drive bays which put the connectors between the case side and the drive. this is a pain in the ass if you want to change drives, squashes the cable into a tiny gap, and prevents easy inspection

the "conventional" design has connections facing the motherboard, which means the cable is sticking out like this, right in the way if you want to do anything at all in the case. it's always there, getting bent, torqued, pushed on, stressing the drive connector

Yes, the design I'm describing still includes cables, but those cables are
a) much shorter
b) intrude much less into the airspace of the case
c) never plug into an HDD directly, only into fully-shrouded connectors

hard drive sata wafers are not shrouded; they're completely open on the bottom, meaning the cable plugs are unsupported and have *fantastic* leverage to snap the wafer off

board mount SATA plugs are shrouded. the plastic outer walls support the plug and spread the load.

notice in the Thermaltake case, they went so far as to put in custom PCBs and still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - because of space constraints and/or absurd cost cutting, they STILL didn't use shrouded plugs. These are flimsy and pathetic.

You could EASILY snap all these wafers off by trying to put the side back on your case without PERFECTLY massaging all the cables so they lay as flat as possible - a mushy, rubbery, miserable affair since the cables aren't designed to go through two 90 degree turns like this

sorry, three turns. To get cables back here you have to twist them along all three axes. it's ABSURD. no EE or mech E worth their salt would tolerate this, you'd be laughed out of any design session for suggesting it.

It would be one thing if the cables were round, but they aren't. They're flat/square in profile, so they resist bending in some directions more than others. They're stiff and resistant and fight anything you do with them. I hate these cables more than any others.

Anyway that's it. The design I propose is unquestionably what would be in use in all computers except for cost cutting and you can look at any server at any price point going back 15 years. when it counts, this is how it's done, no exceptions. that tells us we're getting fucked.