I had to skip X470 because I wanted OoB support for Ryzen 3000. It could just be a case of getting greedy but the TUF and Prime boards are kind of their own class of product where they're just good enough to be above entry but still retain some bizarre behavior similar to the way old SBs would screw customers out of simple upgrades and support for new devices by locking down certain settings or using tech that lets us juggle this or that (but not have both things). I'm in a really bad habit of picking full size ATX boards, so I haven't run into this on anything compact and probably never will. One of the things that drew me to TUF was NVMe support since AMD 970 missed that boat entirely. The PCI-E arrangement is similar enough to the Prime where it looks like you can slot in 3-2-1. As in a triple slot GPU/accelerator, dual slot NIC/other and then some single slot expansion where you're not cutting corners on PCI-E interface. Thing is, PCI-E lanes are limited.
Can't have it all. (´・ω・`) On that note...
Looks like nothing has changed so I'm going to assume...
Nothing has changed.
The amount of sata doesn't really matter to us. OP wants a maximum of 4x to split between a pair of HDDs and SSDs and that is extremely reasonable. I somehow manage to get by with 2xHDDs in an eMachines and keep a pair of sata SSDs in my Ryzen workstation. I don't necessarily
need them. A pair of sata SSDs exist only to keep some things separate from my NVMe and it's obvious there's a disconnect there in access time, seq performance, size and durability. For some things, sata is just better. How?
The 240GB Corsair MP510 NVMe in here is
junk. It was way too fast for me to notice SteamVR chewing through it the first two weeks and this is what I work with until Crucial T500s drop to a good price:
View attachment 339917
Drive wear is still a very real thing. Maybe when it reaches the 5yr mark I'll replace it anyway.
View attachment 339919
If I need caching with infinite TBW I'll just slump whatever onto the WarpDrive. There is no harm in using dated enterprise equipment.
Maybe someday we'll get lucky with compact boards that are arranged to have an M.2 slot for the front and back, an x16, an x4 at the very bottom, pair of sata and no lane juggling at like $150. Can't get here soon enough.