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I have a stack of about 10 200GB HDDs. I can't bring myself to ever plug them in because of the power they'd waste compared to a cheap 2TB NVMe. But I also can't bring myself to chuck them as I remember how expensive they were when I bought them in 2007/8.
Older MBs will use older disks. If you really need to revive your mobo from 10+ years ago, then there are solutions, just don't expect them to be free.
Long ago I had to adapt SATA to IDE connectors, there were such "cards" and pretty cheap 1-2 dollars iirc, might have been 4-5, it was so long ago that the exchange rates were different. There was even the version with the small female 4P connector, the one for the floppy drive for powering the card (yes, was not self-powered).
Essentially, it worked, the "NAS" I built that way with a 2 core bobcat soldered CPU MOBO (an ultra-low power system at the time with passive cooling etc) moved petabytes until it died a horrible death when the tomcat entered it (I kept a panel open for better passive cooling) and peed on the mobo.
What I mean is that the technology evolves, there are so many adaptors for old SATA 2.5 and so cheap that, if you really-really want it you can put NVMe inside and use on an old SATA port, they are like 10 Eur here, but on ali-baba you can probably find cheaper at 6 or so as I found just now:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001230537303.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.20.26321e2f22tJle&algo_pvid=5ded2636-2928-448e-bc0d-937788b72474&algo_exp_id=5ded2636-2928-448e-bc0d-937788b72474-11
Now, do I like it that everyone is catering for the bubble and not for me? Absolutely not, but you know that saying, please God give me the power to change the things that I can change, accept those that I can't change and the wisdom to be able to make the difference between the two.
We are cheapskates here, we will go for the best bargain while the bubble enthusiasts are in the phase when they are not looking at the costs for as long as everyone and their dog is ready to pour money in a "business" that is unprofitable not only now, but is forecasted to be unprofitable for years to come, so guess who will have priority for the companies that are looking for results to report to investors?
That is the immutable law of a capitalist economy, who can afford to pay more will have priority because, in 95% of the cases that means their business is more profitable, therefore more efficient. This is not such a case and the market will, eventually, punish the people working hard to inflate the bubble, but in the meantime there will be great leaps ahead in technology, the AI "investors" are financing much better foundries than me and you would have had done with our gaming videocards, the crypto-bros did it, now it is the AI, in the end we will ALL get better technology at a lower cost because the immense amount of money spent on this bubble financed those R&Ds already and foolish investors are, indirectly, subsidizing our tech of tomorrow. The down side is that we will have to wait until the bubble would have burst, only after that they will scramble to find buyers for the "liquidated" assets and the production capacity, suddenly orphaned by the crash of OpenAI and many others. The "dotcom" bubble left many people poorer, but you can be sure it paid for a lot of the infrastructure which later made the backbone of the internet and brought it to us cheaper than otherwise contributing to wider adoption and the creation of a whole new industry.
Same as you, just that mine are 250 gbs, are 40 pcs and I bought them for 3 Eur each as overstock, unused, sealed, they were kept as spares. I use them for really cold storage (in my attic now there are negative temperatures most likely). I also have copies in 3 places because they cost almost nothing. I will never lose my crypto keys, for example.
If they were all bought at the same time and stored in similar ways, you might want to make sure you have backups on different media types and locations anyway. There's a decent chance they will all fail at similar times.
If they are in use, probably, to some extent, but they are stored in 3 different places in 3 different conditions.
I have a 3x3 rule for important data, 3 different sets (taken at different times, 3 sets at different dates) in three different places with 3 different providers (obviously for servers not private data). This is personal data, but it is still in 3 places, each holding multiple sets.
I was planning something with high quality optic disks but, because I couldn't pass on that deal remembering the times when I was struggling with a 6 GB hdd, I thought that this kind of cold storage is both safe and unexpensive, so why not.
Remember, that is because the data themselves (old family movies taking the most space, some converted from celluloid and scanned photos, for example) are not new at new standards, today the photos might be GBs a piece while many old movies are under a GB for half an hour and, while there are tools for processing and enhancing, that is usually not worth it except for pictures and those were already scanned at high enough resolution.
My point is that you can adapt old hardware to work with new, if you really have to, because in most cases it makes no sense, it is much better to use old technology with old data or other old technology, people complain they need old SATA disks because they don't have enough NVMe slots, but there are so many alternatives, from enclosures to PCI adapters, I get the urge to use old tech till it drops dead, I have the same "problem" still using 2010 tech in places, but complaints about phasing out of various standards or actors leaving the market due to having better profits elsewhere are a. not going to solve anything and b. not a fault of the "corrupted system", this is a feature which does a lot more good than bad, not a bug.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001230537303.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.20.26321e2f22tJle&algo_pvid=5ded2636-2928-448e-bc0d-937788b72474&algo_exp_id=5ded2636-2928-448e-bc0d-937788b72474-11
To be fair, what you are saying is not true. That does not convert NVME (PCI-E) to SATA. That is for NGFF SATA to 2.5" SATA. That does not solve the problem.