fantastic timing, I was literally just seeking you to ask this exact question. I just reacted so strongly to complaining about the macbook's soldered SSD and how much utter bullshit it was, and realized how exact a fit with your product this was. icy dock makes lots of insane bullshit (2x m.2 caddies in a 3.5" external case bay??? actually forgot that was a thing) and that caddy format is fantastic, that's basically expresscard in a thing. and that's the thing, m.2 nvme is basically expresscard 28. you can put all kinds of stuff in there, it's a pcie breakout card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard#/media/File:PCCard...

https://global.icydock.com/products-c5-s48-i0.html

https://global.icydock.com/vancheerfile/images/mb873mp-b_v2/...

would you as a hobbyist just have to implement that with USB4? Is there some way to get raw PCIe for breakout into a bay module like that etc?

That's a product you're pretty uniquely positioned to develop internally just fyi. you have the product/community alignment etc to become the rpi of NVMe GPIO in laptops, so to speak. There is also an appetite for other form factors than just the current IO modules, workstations need workstation modules. Open-standard Expresscard/PCMCIA, or open-Thinkbay formats would be great and nobody else has traction.

You can probably pretty much define your own thing, open publish the standard as a wrapper around a dimensional PCB, and you'd grab traction I bet, if it came to that. nobody else is doing modular thinkbay/expresscard on modern laptops.

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Bullshit pivot option: acquire icy dock, pivot into making weird shit for nerds. Them and Asrock Rack's design team, just give them regular psychedelics allotments and watch the absurd product applications roll in.

https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=https://static.twe...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16277/asrock-rack-deep-mini-i...

The inability to move past the ATX case standard also concerns me when you look at a socket like epyc, and again Framework could potentially be positioned to easily sweep if you can define standard modular formats (LxWxD, prismatic modules) like a server thing for enthusiast cases. Modern super-big-ATX really struggles just to exploit a single-socket server not even flexing its channels fully.

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-genoad8x-2t-bcm-rev...

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MZ... (all the pcie channels blocked by RAM!)

How do you exploit a platform like that? Well, lots of MCIO risers. Or oculink, miniSAS etc. And no cases do that right now either. There should be a modular case system with a skeleton system and backplane boards. Fractal 7XL Storage Layout is interesting as an inspiration there.

That's maybe not Framework's thing but it's an absurd niche that is ripe for someone to step in and define some standards. It's gonna take someone with brand cachet tho. Icy Dock has the meme tech peripherals and you have the niche and cachet to push out all-MCIO or all-Oculink motherboards or other standardized use-cases and convince people it'll work.

https://c-payne.com/products/pcie-gen5-mcio-host-adapter-x16...