[pjdesno]

> Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?

Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche.

I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be replaced without opening the machine, too, which is a major win - every time you pull the machine out on its rails and pop the top is another opportunity for cables to come out or other things to go wrong.

[wtallis]

M.2 boot drives for servers have been popular for years. There's a whole product segment of server boot drives that are relatively low capacity, sometimes even using the consumer form factor (80mm long instead of 110mm) but still including power loss protection. Marvell even made a hardware RAID0/1 controller for NVMe specifically to handle this use case. Nobody's adding a SAS HBA to a server that didn't already need one, and nobody's making any cheap low-port-count SAS HBAs.

[justsomehnguy]

Anything later than and including x4x has M.2 BOSS support and in 2026 you shouldn't buy anything lower than 14th gen. But yes, cheap SSDs serve well as the ESXi boot drives.