Ahh, I'm not the only one with a big case full of disks then (5 HDDs and one NVME SSD in mine). To be honest, one of my biggest bugbears with modern motherboards are the side-mounted SATA sockets. Makes plugging in the cables a royal shit when you're crouched over your case with about 1" of room to spare between the motherboard and other parts of the case... 

It's really tough on these microatx boards.

Absolutely! My last case was too small really, but one "feature" was the rolled lip on the plate the mobo mounted on. Saved cut fingers but just overlapped the stupid side mounted SATA sockets. They could be fitted but what a struggle when you can't get your hands in and the cable's too long anyway.