Got a few kinks to tweek it seems, but god damn is it still impressive and its portable... How or why are we still on SATA when ports which many newer machines have a few of now are running at far greater speeds

Very nice drive. I must say it's a big leap from where we came from 2 years ago in terms of external storage.

Ricepudding:

How or why are we still on SATA when ports which many newer machines have a few of now are running at far greater speeds

The only logical explanation i can think of is not having many PCIe lanes on-chip, or perhaps the AHCI/SATA controller being much cheaper to implement. both thoughts really boil down to cost though, i know cheaper platforms will almost certainly not have very many PCIe lanes to throw at NVMe drives.