Modern consumer devices have an x16 connection for a GPU, an x4 connection for an NVMe, and an x4 connection to the chipset for everything else. If the motherboard has more than one "x16 slot", the other slots usually only have an x1 connection!
Want to add a cheap 10G NIC? Sorry, that uses a Gen 3 x4 connection. x16-to-4xNVMe? Not going to happen. HBA adapter? Forget it.
Meanwhile, the GPU is barely using its Gen 5 x16 connection. Why can't I make use of all this spare bandwidth? Give the GPU a Gen 5 x8 instead, and split the remaining 8 lanes into 1x Gen 3 x16 + 2x Gen 3 x8 or something.
For the prosumer crowd if you do something like the z790 you can have x4, x8, x8, and x8 to the chipset to be split as needed (x16 to be split if 3.0.
So, is there such a thing as an adapter that would plug into a fast narrow slot and provide a wide slower slot with the same overall transfer rate? Or, provide multiple slower (but still just as wide) slots from one faster slot?
It can be hard to sort between expensive/high end enterprise stuff from low end single lane stuff for crypto mining when trying to find something useful though. NVMe m.2 storage is the best chance of finding cheep consumer options but even then you have to sort through the endless bifurcation cards to find the ones that are actual switches though.
Just because we don't need it now, doesn't mean we won't. Just because we might not, the mere fact it becomes available drives prices of existing drives down. That is something everyone needs. That is something that moves society forward.
As a guy who did the very occasional data science job, my iMac Pro's SSD tops out at ~2.7 GB/s in sequential workloads. For 4.5 years of using it I've only seen 3 programs being able to use its SSD to the absolute maximum, and the tasks lasted 30-40 seconds. So it didn't matter much.
I get it, there are people who do specialized work and are doing it every day and they need absolutely everything that the hardware can give them but realistically your average JS / Python / Golang / Rust dev having a 5700x with 32GB RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD (e.g. topping at 4 GB/s) is not just quite fine, they are likely over-served even.
As a guy who peeked under the hood of a lot of open-source software, I have found that software is 99% of the bottleneck, even today. Almost nothing has changed.
You don't know what is possible with more resources being made available.
Eventually, people will figure out how to use them.
The main issue we face is that we're not limited by the top end, we're limited by the bottom end.
Bottom end computers are still running sata and 8gb of ram. Once you see that stuff move to 32gb and 1tb nvme, you might see changes in strategy.
Games are a big one for example, those things now run multi hundred GB, SSD speeds make a huge difference in what is possible there.
Just wait til game Devs figure out how to use generative ai backed by huge models disk speed and ram will definitely play a role.
People back then knew very well what they'd do with beyond 64K. Unlike you who is simply hand-waving this away by saying "who knows what will we use it for".
You're also forgetting financials which is quite a glaring omission. Modern computer prices haven't dropped much in a while now, like 5 years or so, because the bleeding edge remains expensive. Most people are unwilling to pay bigger and bigger prices for what they perceive as the same processing power -- and their perception is largely correct because software remains the dominating bottleneck in computing power.
So nope, it's not the same 64K argument again. We have companies that desperately want us to believe that we want 512 GB/s RAM modules and we should pay thousands for the privilege of having hardware that is only 0.1% likely to be utilized properly.
People do get hyped up when they see these impressive numbers, yes. But when they see the prices, they suddenly get smarter.
Also I'm not sure it really prices existing drives down any as much as prices new classes of drives up. Similar to data center GPUs not making the nvidia 4000 series dirt cheap compared to previous years - nearly the opposite it detracts from focus on the budget standard consumer focused segments