Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

The first NVMe over PCIe consumer drive was launched a decade ago.

It's hard to even find new PC builds using SATA drives.

SATA was phased out many years ago. The primary market for SATA SSDs is upgrading old systems or maybe the absolute lowest cost system integrators at this point, but it's a dwindling market.

NVMe via m.2 remains more than fine for covering the consumer SSD use cases.

It's more likely that third party integrators will look after the demand for SSD SAS/SATA devices, and the demand won't go away because SAS multiplexers are cheap and NVMe/PCIe is point to point and expensive to make switching hardware for.

Likely we'd need a different protocol to make scaling up the number of high speed SSDs in a single box to work well.

SATA just needs to be retired. It's already been replaced, we don't need Yet Another Storage Interface. Considering consumer IO-Chipsets are already implemented in such a way that they take 4 (or generally, a few) upstream lanes of $CurrentGenPCIe to the CPU, and bifurcating/multiplexing it out (providing USB, SATA, NVMe, etc I/O), we should just remove the SATA cost/manufacturing overhead entirely, and focusing on keeping the cost of keeping that PCIe switching/chipset down for consumers (and stop double-stacking chipsets AMD, motherboards are pricey enough). Or even just integrating better bifurcation support on the CPU's themselves as some already support it (typically via converting x16 on the "top"/"first" PCIe slot to x4/x4/x4/x4).

Going forward, SAS should just replace SATA where NVMe PCIe is for some reason a problem (eg price), even on the consumer side, as it would still support existing legacy SATA devices.

Storage related interfaces (I'm aware there's some overlap here, but point is, there's already plenty of options, and lots of nuances to deal with already, let's not add to it without good reason):

- NVMe PCIe

- M.2 and all of it's keys/lengths/clearances

- U.2 (SFF-8639) and U.3 (SFF-TA-1001)

- EDSFF (which is a very large family of things)

- FibreChannel

- SAS and all of it's permutations

- Oculink

- MCIO

- Let's not forget USB4/Thunderbolt supporting Tunnelling of PCIe

Obligatory: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png

I prefer SSDs because the connector is so much more accessible. Ripping out the video card and futzing with the pain of that tiny NVME screw is no fun.

I am almost never IO blocked where the performance difference between the two matters. I guess when I do the initial full backup image of my drive, but after that, everything is incremental.

I remember running my first NVME drive via a PCIe adapter on my i7 4790K about a decade ago... man, that was a game changer for sure, almost as much as going from HDD to SSD on SATA around 2009.

I've been doing my home NASes in m.2 NVMe for years now with 12 disks on one and 22 disks on another (backup still HDD though):

DWPD: Between the random teamgroup drives in the main NAS and WD Red Pro HDDs in the backup, the write limits are actually about the same. With the bonus reads are infinite on the SSDs, so things like scheduled ZFS scrubs don't count as 100 TB of usage across the pool each time.

Heat: Actually easier to manage than the HDDs. The drives are smaller (so denser for the same wattage) but the peak wattage is lower than the idle spinning wattage of the HDDs and there isn't a large physical buffer between the hot parts and the airflow. My normal case airflow keeps them at <60C under sustained benching of all of the drives raw, and more like <40 C given ZFS doesn't like to go more than 8 GB/s in this setup anyways. If you select $600 top end SSDs with high wattage controllers shipping with heatsinks you might have more of a problem, otherwise it's like 100 W max for the 22 drives and easy enough to cool.

PLP: More problematic if this is part of your use case, as NVMe drives with PLP will typically lead you straight into enterprise pricing. Personally my use case is more "on demand large file access" with extremely low churn data regularly backed up for the long term and I'm not at a loss if I have an issue and need to roll back to yesterday's data, but others who use things more as an active drive may have different considerations.

The biggest downsides I ran across were:

- Loading up all of the lanes on a modern consumer board works in theory, can be buggy as hell in practice. Anything from the boot becoming EXTREMELY long to just not working at all sometimes to PCIe errors during operation. Used Epyc in a normal PC case is the way to go instead.

- It costs more, obviously

- Not using a chassis designed for massive numbers of drives with hot-swap access can be quite the pain to troubleshoot install for.

The biggest upsides (other than the obvious ones) I ran across were:

- No spinup drain on the PSU

- No need to worry about drive powersaving/idling <- pairs with -> whole solution is quiet enough to sit in my living room without hearing drive whine.

- I don't look like a struggling fool trying to move a full chassis around :)

Its also quite difficult to find 2280 M.2 SATA SSD. Had an old laptop that only takes 2280 M.2 SATA SSD.

Its always one of the 2. M.2 but PCIe/NVMe, or SATA but not M.2.

Probably because QNAP and Synology pricing is rent seeking behavior on per drive bay pricing models.

The difficulty with pcie to m.2 adapters is you usually can't use bifurcation below x4 and active PCIe switches got very expensive after PCIe 3.0.

Used multiport SATA HBA cards are inexpensive on eBay. Multiport nvme cards are either passive for bifurcation and give you 4x x4 for an x16 slot or are active and very expensive.

I don't see how you get to 16 m.2 devices on a consumer socket without lots of expense.

I don't think there are any consumer boards which support this?

In practice you can put 4 drives in the x16 slot intended for a GPU, 1 drive each in any remaining PCIe slots, plus whatever is available onboard. 8 should be doable, but I doubt you can go beyond 12.

I know there are some $2000 PCIe cards with onboard switches so you can stick 8 NVMe drives on there - even with an x1 upstream connection - but at that point you're better off going for a Threadripper board.

Can you point to a specific motherboard? 16 separate PCIe links of any width sounds rather high for a consumer platform.

Are you sure? I've seen plenty of motherboards bundle a PCIe riser to passively bifurcate the PCIe slot to support four M.2 drives in an x16 slot or two in an x8 slot, but doing eight M.2 drives in one PCIe slot would either require a PCIe switch that would be too expensive for a free bundled card, or require PCIe bifurcation down to two lanes per link, which I don't think any workstation CPUs have ever supported. And 32TB is possible with just four M.2 SSDs.

Agreed... although it would be nice to find easier support for older formats, they do stick around for a while. I've got a 3.5" USB floppy in my garage that's been sitting for over a decade now, and even then it was long after CD/BR and thumb drives were the norm.

Cheaper, sturdier, and more easily swappable than NVME while still being far faster than spinning discs. I use them basically as independent cartridges, this one's work, that one's a couple TB of raw video files plus the associated editor project, that one has games and movies. I can confidently travel with 3-4 unprotected in my bag.

There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.

Where do you add more storage after you've used your 1-2 nvme slots and the m.2?

I would think an SSD is going to be better than a spinning disc even with the limits of sata if you want to archive things or work with larger data or whatever

> Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?

Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche.

I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be replaced without opening the machine, too, which is a major win - every time you pull the machine out on its rails and pop the top is another opportunity for cables to come out or other things to go wrong.

I bought 2 of the 870 QVOs a few years ago and put them in software RAID 0 for my steam library. They cost significantly less per TB than the M.2 drives at the time.

Are any SATA SSDs actually built to sink heat into the enclosure? e.g. The 860 Pro released in 2018 has a PCB taking up a third of plastic enclosure with no heatsinks to speak of: https://www.myfixguide.com/samsung-860-pro-ssd-teardown/

And even in worst-case hammering of drives, thermally throttled NVMEs can still sustain higher speeds than SATA drives.

Lots of consumer SATA SSDs don't have any thermal pads between the PCB and the case, and plastic cases are common. Heat just isn't a problem for a drive that's only drawing 2-3W under load.

And most consumer NVMe SSDs don't need any extra cooling for normal use cases, because consumer workloads only generate bursts of high-speed IO and don't sustain high power draw long enough for cooling to be a serious concern.

In the datacenter space where it is actually reasonable to expect drives to be busy around the clock, nobody's been trying to get away with passive cooling even for SATA SSDs.

No advantage over SAS here - it's the same form factor.

> down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...

People like you and I pay tariffs. Not China. You realize that right? And how will that stop China? Tariffs mostly hurt American consumers and producers. Just ask farmers.

He's being downvoted because it's a dumb, knee-jerk comment. This has nothing to do with RAM, the thing getting really expensive at the moment, and Samsung isn't even stopping SSD production (which would be worth getting really mad about). It's about stopping production for a specific interface which has long since been saturated by even the cheapest, crummiest SSDs.

SATA SSDs don't really have much of a reason to exist anymore (and to the extent they do, certainly not by Samsung, who specializes in the biggest, baddest, fastest drives you can buy and is probably happy to leave the low end of the market to others).