Published Oct 25, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.

Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.

When it comes to adding storage to a PC, SATA drives make up some of the better options in terms of value for money, but every motherboard generation seems to ship with fewer SATA ports than the last. Even if a board does come with plenty of ports, some of them tend to go dark the moment you populate a certain M.2 slot.…