Samsung is reportedly preparing to wind down its SATA SSD business, and a notable hardware leaker warns the move could have broader implications for consumer storage pricing than Micron’s decision to end its Crucial RAM lineup. The report suggests reduced supply and short-term price pressure may follow as the market adjusts. Update: Samsung refutes the SATA SSD lineup demise rumor.
Everyone is going to buy M.2 SSDs first, and only buy SATA if they don’t have enough M.2 slots. I really doubt SATA SSDs are selling well.
With that said, I don’t see SATA going anywhere. It’s (comparatively low) bandwidth means you can throw a few ports on your board and not sacrifice much. For some quick math: a M.2 port back-hauled by PCIe 4.0 x4 has 7.8 GB/s of data lines going to it. While SATA 6.0 has only 0.75 GB/s of data lines going to it.
Even then, NVMe riser cards are a thing to just stick an NVMe drive in a spare PCIe slot.
Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability
Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)
I have one m.2 and multiple sata ssd, since on my motherboard occupying the second m.2 slot would drop the pcie lane for my GPU due to sharing bandwidth.
Do newer boards not have that problem?
Higher spec boards dont have this issue; Typically an issue with low and mid range boards due to cost savings.
Which just also shows why this is a very anti consumer move. Its trying to artifically push people to by new hardware because there hasn’t been significant enough changes to really warrant it. This then means more people who might have swapped off of windows to keep their existing hardware might end up having to upgrade then stick with their familiar windows platform so that the ai bubble can continue. Its completely fucked up
SATA is really convenient for larger storage, though. I keep my OS on nvmes, but I’ve got a couple of SATA drive and a hot swap bay for games, media, etc.
I’m still running SATA spinny disks for my big-ish data. I can’t afford a 16TB SSD…
I know that’s off topic, but HDDs are still a thing too.
I’m very excited for the day I can replace my spinners with SSDs. That day is coming, but it is not today.