Still one major consumer use for SATA SSDs - increasing the storage capacity on an existing system. It is far easier to add a SATA SSD than to replace the existing NVMe drive with a larger one. (Many systems only have one NVMe port so adding an extra NVMe drive is not possible.) SATA SSDs also tend to be cheaper than NVMe drives of the same capacity.
You know you can get a PCIe riser card to get another m.2 slot. As for the price difference, if the difference between the SATA and the NVMe versions are less than $50, I'll get the NVMe.
Pity Anandtech doesn't cover this feature, when reviewing motherboards. I think 4x4 bifurcation is quite common for new AMD boards, but it is difficult to get precise information.
Well, if I'm looking to add a big QLC for a Steam drive, I'm honestly not keen on fighting a huge battle to add risers and get them sorted out so they all play nice, especially since, for most games, the load times really aren't that different.
My experience with USB riser cards has generally been painful, and generally required several tries to get one that actually worked correctly, and I doubt NVMe risers have much better quality control/support.
USB to NVMe adapters have been a minefield, though it's slowly improving. But that's because USB to NVMe adapters are fundamentally complicated, involving bridge chips and firmware and questionable adherence to power delivery standards.
PCIe to M.2 risers are dead simple. Small ones are basically foolproof. Ones with multiple M.2 slots don't need to include any electronics more complicated than a 12V to 3.3V regulator. Ones supporting PCIe gen4 may need to use slightly above-average materials and tolerances to ensure signal integrity, or else include redrivers or maybe retimers if they're trying to be server-grade risers. But even after accounting for all of those caveats, that only adds up to about as much unreliability as the cheap SATA cables that were bundled with your motherboard.
Those pcie riser cards work well if you have at least 2x PCIE lanes available. And they are dead cheap (I picked mine up for about $5.00 each) and they work fine even in PCIE v4.0 slots.
A single port riser is $15 and works fine for adding nvme storage. I have one in my desktop. Nothing extra needed from the mobo, it just converts the slot on the mobo to an m.2 slot.
I suspect Duncan may be referring to laptops, where it's not rare to have one m.2 connector and one SATA 2.5" connector. That was the reason my most recently purchased SSD was a SATA SSD.
Though it would be interesting to hear how much of that market is migrating to offering two m.2 connectors instead of one of each.
That assumes that you have a free PCIe slot. For many SFF systems, adding an M.2 adapter card is not an option. Once your M.2 slots are full, you're stuck with SATA, Thunderbolt, or USB. That'll be the situation until U.2 begins to replace SATA.
NVME with either lower-quality or slower Flash (sometimes both!) is always a bad idea. Almost every PC in existence still has room for an additional 2.5" SATA drive, and aside from the utter lack in savings going with QLC, SATA drives at 4+ TB make a great replacement for spinning rust.
I continue to fail understanding why Anandtech is pushing QLC so hard when it's bad for everyone except OEMs. Anything QLC drives are targeted at, TLC SATA or even HDDs are a better option.
Reviews where crap NVME drives don't exceed SATA port performance, yet are still recommended for anything other than a notebook, still make me SMH.
I've replaced an existing NVMe drive with a larger one on a mobo with only one NVMe slot by buying a $5 PCIe NVMe adapter card to get them both running at the same time so that I could clone old to new. Or you can buy a $15 External USB to PCIe NVM enclosure, and you have the added benefit of being able to repurpose your old NVMe drive as a portable USB flash drive with pretty fast transfer speeds.
I was always hoping that chip prices would drop and that's where SATA SSDs would shine. With their physically larger size, they could fit more chips in it and start replacing HDDs. Well that never seemed to have materialized.
I wouldn't care if a SATA SSD wasn't as fast as some of the fastest NVMe drives, if it's got larger capacity. If they made a 6 TB SATA SSD that cost $300 and was only double the performance of a HDD, I'd buy a bunch of them now.
There are available cheap (relatively speaking) USB 3.1 and USB-C PCIe M.2 drive enclosures that make upgrading to a larger NVMe drive a lot easier. Just pop the new drive into the enclosure and clone the existing drive over. Swap them when the copy is finished and you are done. Did this for upgrading a laptop with a small 256G pcie M.2 drive to a 1TB pcie M.2 drive. Worked well.
It’s true! From a warranty perspective, the battery and the ssd are the only components with a shelf life. Won’t be surprise if we start seeing TB written % in the warranty limitation (same as battery)
I'm not sure about the not recommending SATA for new builds. As secondary drives they are fine. I went M2 Nvme for my boot drive and Raid 0 setup with Samsung 860 EVO for my games drives there are no hard drives in my build as I have a NAS on the network. I only have 1 m2 slot available and still 4 unused SATA ports.
I will use those 4 additional sata ports before I fill the 2nd M2 slot most likely. Its only when I see games that will benefit from NVME that I will be concerned with loading them on my drive. Now if they could bring down pricing on 2TB and 4TB SATA drives that would be great.
It's been impressive to see how quickly NVME has maxed out PCIe 3.0. It looks like PCIe 4.0 will also be maxed out quite quickly. Will be good to see PCIe 5.0 drives coming out sooner rather than later, though I strongly suspect it will be from the likes of AMD or Apple, not Intel.
If Intel could pull a rabbit out of the hat and produce PCIe 5.0 support before everyone else, that would go a long way towards bringing them back to the top again. Will they? Probably not.
Hopefully NVME 2.0 / Zoned Namespaces will also help with the other two corners of SSD performance - random I/O performance. That's nowhere near maxing PCIe 3.0, and has a long way to go. Apple said as much when they gave their M1 chips huge registers and SSD bandwidth - there is a lot more SSDs can do to shovel random data into the CPU in the huge quantities needed.
Intel and AMD will both likely have PCIe 5.0 in 2022. Intel might just squeak it in during the end of 2021. The first PCIe 5.0 hardware was recently successfully tested and it used Intel chips.
3D-Xpoint already excels at random low-Q depth IO without any of those optimizations. Such a shame that a technology that would excel at small drive for normal users is a expensive niche solution for businesses.
My review sample of the ADATA Gammix S70 literally arrived without warning while I was writing this article. I had to go back and edit a statement about Innogrit controllers still being MIA. So far, it appears the only place to order one is ADATA's own online store, but they claim to be in stock.
Imo we'll still see SATA SSDs for a while. They'll just have lower-binned NAND than NVMe. Very few systems support more than 2 NVMe disks and that's just not very much storage.
Billy, might I suggest that at some point, for interest, you run the standard AnandTech SSD benchmarks on an M1 Mac? The reason this would be interesting is this: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/30/getting-ssd-pe...
The author is not interested in dick-measuring "proofs" of how great the SSDs are, rather he just wants a feel for how they behave under *his* standard workloads (and using standard macOS API calls, no playing around with low level calls, queue depths, etc). There are also three or four earlier articles that explain his methodology and reasoning.
Even so, the numbers he sees are fairly impressive when compared to other "laptop" SSD results; simplifying down to essentially 2.8GB/s for a range of "realistic" sizes and use patterns. This means it would be interesting to see how those numbers compare with the drives you are benchmarking every month when running essentially the same sort of test code.
"there aren't many PCs left that need a SATA SSD for an aftermarket upgrade" I seriously disagree with this statement. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of computers that exist in offices, homes or for sale on the used market that do not use M.2 drives at all, let alone NVMe. Even a bottom of the barrel DRAM-less SATA SSD will make these systems run perfectly for the average non-gamer, and will likely run acceptably for YEARS until something outright fails. I would bet that the majority of those users would notice very little difference in every day tasks (web, email, etc) if you had them upgrade to a brand new system with an NVMe SSD.
When Windows 10 no longer functions on anything older than Kaby Lake, then maybe we'll see a real decline in the need for SATA SSDs, but for now, I think demand for the drives themselves is quite high. Just because manufacturers no longer need to invest R&D money into SATA SSDs to satisfy consumers doesn't mean there is no market for the existing drives.
Take this with a grain of salt, but compare the number of user ratings of popular SATA SSDs on Amazon to the number on popular NVMe models. Most of the SATA drives have 4-8x the number of ratings, despite only being a year or two older. This isn't a guaranteed metric (too many variables) but saying that SATA drives are already becoming obsolete isn't true.
New PCs already have SSDs in them. Old PCs that don't feel fast enough (or need larger SSDs) are the ones people are upgrading... and by far the vast majority don't use NVMe.
"Everyone is finding 3D TLC NAND to be fast enough for almost every purpose, and the niche for faster-than-TLC storage options will remain tiny. There are no revolutionary new memory technologies poised to shake up the market in the near future."
well, I remain convinced that at some point, solid state storage will be fast enough to support memory-to-memory ISA, i.e. directly in storage. just like in the early 80s. once that happens, lots and lots of code will be ripped out and simplified. OS writers will start pulling their hair out, of course. cpu design will be greatly simplified, what with jettisoning all those levels of cache/buffer, and transaction control (both in the RDBMS sense and general data control) will need be re-thought. if that comes about, cpu chips get really, really tiny. have you looked at how much of a current chip is some form of memory?
Adding a SATA SSD is easy enough that many home users (or bright children!!) can do it. Replacing the only storage drive in a system (NVMe or SATA) requires someone who knows how to move the whole OS etc from one drive to another. This is a tedious process that often requires booting from a USB stick (or CD) to do the transfer and also often requires an external adapter to hold one of the drives during the process. Not difficult for someone with good knowledge of computers but too difficult for most home users.
With how few lanes are available on consumer platforms, it's hard to ask for U.2 ports. I'd love to see ITX boards start to actually use up the remaining PCIe lanes on U.2 ports, but there's barely enough lanes to populate an mATX board without spreading things pretty thin on either consumer platform!
I really thought we'd start to see more lanes by now but the status quo appears to be set in stone. Hopefully AM5 will fix this mess, I doubt Intel will do so with its next platform.
ITX are a bit of a problem for M2 ports as they only have one, my son recently bought a SATA SSD drive for his games as he is planning to go down the ITX root for his next build. I am sure it is not beyond the whit of the board designers to be able to offer 2 or 3 vertical M2 slots next to the main 16x PCI slot as they would be no more that standard 1x size and there is a few unused lanes on these bards. The raised position may also improve cooling.
Some ITX boards have 2x m.2 slots, usually one on the top and one on the back of the board. They cost more though.
4 or 6 SATA ports are wasted on ITX, I hope cutting that down to 1 or 2 will release space for more m.2 slots.
Side mounted / vertical m.2 slots is an interesting idea, not seen that one before. Could fit a supporting frame for 2 x m.2 drives into the space that a single flat m.2 drive takes.
This is not a statement about "computers" it is a statement about operating systems. I expect it's true for Linux and Windows; it's not true for Apple.
My point is not "rah rah Apple", it's that this is a problem that can be fixed, one way or another. Maybe that way is that Linux and MS get their act together? Maybe it's that Apple and Chromebooks expand to a much larger share of the market?
Even this fetishization of internal storage is a concept that's approaching its sell-by date. For almost all the use cases of large amounts of storage, connecting to external storage via TB, USB or even ethernet, is perfectly adequate. If a normal person needs more storage, the answer is to buy a USB SDD, not to dick around with popping their machine open.
Very easy, and convenient. It will be a loss when boards get rid of SATA ports.
"move the whole OS ... this is a tedious process"
When I was a youngster, it used to bring me much joy formatting and reinstalling Windows on almost a weekly basis. Those were the 9x days. Backing up stuff to another drive. Booting with a floppy disk or the Windows CD. Using DOS to format and run setup.exe. Reading the entertaining messages MS used to put in Windows Setup. Nowadays, I shrink from even thinking about reinstalling Windows.
Sabrent started shipping almost the day that they got final firmware from Phison. Availability is definitely still limited, but at least here in the US they are in stock and available for purchase.
I'd take an MLC SATA SSD over the overpriced, overheating QLC NVME any day.
Plus bonus I get MLC SATA, Samsung 860PRO. The last best MLC drive, the NVMe TLC & QLC is only option going forward since Samsung abandoned the MLC with 980PRO. Just look a the TBW of these 860 PROs vs the TLC and QLC Is worst garbage.
8TB SSD is useless esp when I want to write a lot of data and have them near 80% full, mechanical WD RED / Seagate Exos are much much much better and cheaper options. For those with mATX and other Console type builds they have to adjust to this QLC trash only. EATX and Standard can get any number of SATA drives. Esp all the premium boards have SATA x8 connections. SATA will always be better, newer is never always good. So much of sacrifice and that SLC cache bs and ton of crap.
Unfortunately for laptops SATA Is almost done, thin and light BGA garbage sells more and Apple made people crave for that thin and light bs so Soldered SSDs and if the OEM cares about user a bit NVMe slots will exist. Even the Clevo machines are now done with SATA I guess.. a shame.
About consoles, they max around a 2070S and with unified memory arch, do they even have any inherent advantage over ? So far nothing. Load times are one of the benefits but once true next gen games hit, like UE5, Rockstar RAGE and other then we will see how Consoles handle. PC will handle always no matter what, since even in 2020 we are seeing non SSE fixes for the game exes to run the new games. But on the storage side, I do not expect any FPS improvements from SATA to NVMe to Gen 4 SSDs, maybe new Engines will change that ?
Dell XPS 15 7591 shipped with an open 2.5in drive slot, which is part of why I recommended it to my partner. Still thin, around 4lbs.
2.5in drives were always limited in the 13 inch laptop space. There were already designs that shipped mSATA only. The change is how many people buy 13 inch compared to 14 and 15, and how many 15 inch designs use a different platform than the 13 inch design (leaving 14 as a stretched 13, which stinks).
“ For those with mATX and other Console type builds they have to adjust to this QLC trash only.”
Eh? I was putting 5 drives in my mITX builds a couple of years ago, and mITX is far smaller than mATX.
I used the Fractal Design Node 202 which is one of the smallest mass market mITX chassis at 10 litres. 1x nvme, 3x 2.5” multi-TB HDDs, and another 2.5” SATA SDD. All went in fine, plenty of room, plus a full size 1060 GPU if desired.
"there aren't many PCs left that need a SATA SSD for an aftermarket upgrade"
huh? nvme m.2 slots weren't widespread on desktop motherboards until about 2017 or so. this is just flat out wrong, unless people are chucking their computers in the garbage after 3 years
You are mistakenly presuming that the entire installed base of desktop PCs are in need of some kind of storage upgrade, or will be in the future. This is absurd. Most PCs out there already have adequate storage to finish out the useful lifespan of the system. Of the PC users whose usage will outgrow whatever SSD storage their machine already has, most can either get a hard drive for all their cold data, or they're the kind of power user who isn't running a system so old and low-end that it doesn't have any M.2 or PCIe slots to spare.
You're mistaken how "power users" actually buy and use systems. Hardware enthusiasts might well fit into your description of power users but it certainly doesn't describe the majority of power users. There are very few power users with unlimited money, and by contrast there are plenty of power users with older systems around that are in use and need storage upgrades at various points.
"Hardware enthusiasts" and "power users" don't overlap completely, but collectively they're still not capable of driving enough sales through aftermarket upgrades to keep SATA SSDs relevant as more than a niche curiosity in a world where the vast majority of client/consumer systems will never have more than two drives and the first one is NVMe by default because the price premium is so small. Two of the six NAND manufacturers are already done with SATA. And if you think that U.2 will ever catch on for consumer storage, your views on the market are obviously very different from how the manufacturers see it based on real sales data.
The widespread adoption of U.2 outside of the enterprise space is probably going to depend much on how users' needs are met with M.2 solutions. I'm noticing that boards with two M.2 NVMe slots are becoming more common, which might be enough to satisfy most folks. I'd like to see U.2 succeed where SATA Express failed, especially for SFF PCs that lack available PCIe slots, but I suspect that USB4/TB4 may end up taking that role just due to economies of scale and being "good enough".
I really doubt that u.2 will become common. It seems to require larger motherboard ports than SATA, plus a thick expensive cable, plus u.2 still uses the 2.5” drive size. All these three things are going very much against the historical trend of fewer cables, smaller ports and reduced physical size. More likely to see increased use of multiple m.2 slots for internal storage, and a usb4/thunderbolt port provided for people who want gigantic storage.
U.2 cables are expensive, but no more so than active USB4 or TB4 cables. But I do agree that M.2 PCIe adapter cards are probably going to be the cheaper option for most folks if the price of U.2 cables remain high. At least inexpensive M.2 to U.2 adapters exist for folks who want to go the U.2 route.
When will this site’s authors recognize one of the most basic principles of business: economy of scale?
QLC only offers 30% higher density than TLC and comes with big drawbacks thanks to it having twice as many voltage states (16). That’s called diminished returns.
QLC is being pushed by manufacturers because it’s higher margins for them, not because it’s a better technology for us.
Economy of scale is one of the tools being used against consumer value in this case. The more QLC is made instead of TLC, the worse value TLC becomes.
Consumers are supposed to drive the market but corporations rely on asymmetric information (consumer ignorance via marketing strategy) and limited competition (often, as tech is loaded with low-competition areas) to drive the market instead.
"Consumers are supposed to drive the market but corporations rely on asymmetric information "
from the beginning, the PC revolution had/has two tracks: bidnezz (exemplified by 1-2-3 and DOS) and consumer with Apple. near as I can tell, that bifurcation still exists. over time, consumers, looking for job skills, got 1-2-3 (and some kind of wordprocessing) by hook or by crook and kept the revolution going. these days it appears that the gulf between the two camps is ever wider. IOW, how many consumers, these days, are getting aholt of bidnezz applications in order to progress in the workplace?
If there are still no durability issues experienced during ownership, then 30% is a real return and not one that comes at some realized cost.
It's logically stupid to not recognize this considering that TLC is less durable than MLC, and MLC is less durable than SLC. Capacity gains across all cell types increases drive lifespan, as it reduces the frequency of each cell being rewritten. This, QLC will replace TLC for the same reason TLC replaced MLC, and PLC will eventually replace QLC.
'30% is a real return' that comes at twice as many voltage states. Voltage states are not a free lunch. Going to 16 states is diminished returns.
'It's logically stupid to not recognize this considering that TLC is less durable than MLC, and MLC is less durable than SLC. Capacity gains across all cell types increases drive lifespan, as it reduces the frequency of each cell being rewritten.'
30% capacity is below the cost of doubling the number of voltage states. It's already in the diminished returns category.
By your 'logic' we can just happily skip QLC entirely and go to sixteen layer NAND. Why not? Think of all that free density!
" '30% is a real return' that comes at twice as many voltage states. Voltage states are not a free lunch. Going to 16 states is diminished returns. "
presumably, one hopes, the engineers at these NAND makers have done the arithmetic, in the statistical sense, to understand the balance between increasing number of voltage states per cell with the degradation of said states over time. IOW, has it been shown that over-provisioning from the increased density, out weighs the decreases in lifetime due to loss of precision from these ever narrower voltage spans and loss of P/E cycles? we do know (yes?) that both P/E cycles and warranty periods have declined in lock-step from SLC to QLC.
I generally agree about QLC being rubbish, though the maths does say that these drives should last beyond the life of one's computer: decades. That's theory; it would be nice if someone did an actual endurance experiment, like Techreport's in 2015, so that QLC can show us what it's made of.
As for diminishing returns, agreed. Practically everything in life is subject to this law. Quite likely, after adding a few more bits, they'll reach a limit and will have to resort to more layers and other stacking tricks, till some new technology comes out. I suppose in computers it's always been like that: killing it with the big gains, then painfully squeezing out every last drop, then some new insight throwing open the gates.
It looks as if QLC will become the "mainstream" option in time and TLC some sort of "Pro" variant (didn't Samsung do something like that recently?). Sadly, that's how it goes in this greedy world, and I say that with a deep sigh.
Dunno people, I had 4 different ssd's, and even all tlc's were used for cache or storage, the experience was in some case disappointing. The 850 evo 120 gb used for cache after 16 month was so slow I had to remove it. The first one was an OCZ and again less than 2 years and it became terribly slow. The 860 evo 256gb is still working but it almost halved its 4kRND q1t1. The 840 pro 256 is still working, I used it till this may as w10 drive, consistent performance, and reliability well over its declared endurance. All the drive have/had from 15 to 20% overprovisioning. I would love to buy new gen optane
I hope to see Intel's newest 3D XPoint consumer drives this year, and I also hope they'll have nvme 2 spec. I have been saving up each month for a boot drive.
I still have a 120GB OCZ that I bought when I built my 2500K system way back when - used there for over 5 years and more than year on another system - drive testing didn't reveal any issues or lower capacity - the durability concerns are way over blown
It was my understanding that moving from SATA to NVMe does almost nothing for Windows and game loading times and anecdotally this seems to be the case for me.
It would be nice to see some clarification given the article claims NVMe has higher performance - which it does in some situations, don't get me wrong, but many users do not have these situations.
Appears to be faster mainly in file copying (drastically), professional editing, and things like that; and only slightly faster in other tasks. Haven't used one, so just speaking from what I've read. I suppose, depending on one's tasks, a SATA SSD will give one 80-90% the performance of an NVMe drive. Techpowerup has some nice real-world tests:
Got my M1 MacBook Pro on December 21, which uses PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs. I went from the top Intel MacBook Pro (i9 15" 32 gigs RAM) to this entry-level Mac because the warranty was running out and I was a bit worried about the expense of replacing the keyboard. Apple actually offered me a lot more for trade-in than I thought I could get. They beat all the independent trade-in companies by a lot (up to $400 more). Anyway, the drive is vastly faster, and the computer just seems like a speed leap of more like two or three generations. And I'm betting a big part of that is two-fold. The United Memory Architecture, plus the PCIe 4.0 SSD seem to me to be the future of all computers that are going to be competitive. The old system bus will be on life support in the not-too-distant future.
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Duncan Macdonald - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Still one major consumer use for SATA SSDs - increasing the storage capacity on an existing system. It is far easier to add a SATA SSD than to replace the existing NVMe drive with a larger one. (Many systems only have one NVMe port so adding an extra NVMe drive is not possible.)SATA SSDs also tend to be cheaper than NVMe drives of the same capacity.
trparky - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
You know you can get a PCIe riser card to get another m.2 slot. As for the price difference, if the difference between the SATA and the NVMe versions are less than $50, I'll get the NVMe.Midwayman - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
You can get another 4 slots with a riser card, though motherboard support is a little more complicated.popej - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
Pity Anandtech doesn't cover this feature, when reviewing motherboards.I think 4x4 bifurcation is quite common for new AMD boards, but it is difficult to get precise information.
HarryVoyager - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
Well, if I'm looking to add a big QLC for a Steam drive, I'm honestly not keen on fighting a huge battle to add risers and get them sorted out so they all play nice, especially since, for most games, the load times really aren't that different.My experience with USB riser cards has generally been painful, and generally required several tries to get one that actually worked correctly, and I doubt NVMe risers have much better quality control/support.
Sata is at least built in and well understood.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
USB to NVMe adapters have been a minefield, though it's slowly improving. But that's because USB to NVMe adapters are fundamentally complicated, involving bridge chips and firmware and questionable adherence to power delivery standards.PCIe to M.2 risers are dead simple. Small ones are basically foolproof. Ones with multiple M.2 slots don't need to include any electronics more complicated than a 12V to 3.3V regulator. Ones supporting PCIe gen4 may need to use slightly above-average materials and tolerances to ensure signal integrity, or else include redrivers or maybe retimers if they're trying to be server-grade risers. But even after accounting for all of those caveats, that only adds up to about as much unreliability as the cheap SATA cables that were bundled with your motherboard.
cyberguyz - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Those pcie riser cards work well if you have at least 2x PCIE lanes available. And they are dead cheap (I picked mine up for about $5.00 each) and they work fine even in PCIE v4.0 slots.ilkhan - Friday, January 1, 2021 - link
A single port riser is $15 and works fine for adding nvme storage. I have one in my desktop. Nothing extra needed from the mobo, it just converts the slot on the mobo to an m.2 slot.Mikewind Dale - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
But many systems only have extra x1 PCIe slots, not x4 slots.Boxie - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
PCIe 2.0 x1 lane speed is still ~ 500mb/s according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#History_... so it is still SATA speeds with less latency and a x1 to m.2 nvme card is only a handful of dollarsIBM760XL - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
I suspect Duncan may be referring to laptops, where it's not rare to have one m.2 connector and one SATA 2.5" connector. That was the reason my most recently purchased SSD was a SATA SSD.Though it would be interesting to hear how much of that market is migrating to offering two m.2 connectors instead of one of each.
Lucky Stripes 99 - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
That assumes that you have a free PCIe slot. For many SFF systems, adding an M.2 adapter card is not an option. Once your M.2 slots are full, you're stuck with SATA, Thunderbolt, or USB. That'll be the situation until U.2 begins to replace SATA.Great_Scott - Sunday, January 3, 2021 - link
NVME with either lower-quality or slower Flash (sometimes both!) is always a bad idea. Almost every PC in existence still has room for an additional 2.5" SATA drive, and aside from the utter lack in savings going with QLC, SATA drives at 4+ TB make a great replacement for spinning rust.I continue to fail understanding why Anandtech is pushing QLC so hard when it's bad for everyone except OEMs. Anything QLC drives are targeted at, TLC SATA or even HDDs are a better option.
Reviews where crap NVME drives don't exceed SATA port performance, yet are still recommended for anything other than a notebook, still make me SMH.
dotes12 - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
I've replaced an existing NVMe drive with a larger one on a mobo with only one NVMe slot by buying a $5 PCIe NVMe adapter card to get them both running at the same time so that I could clone old to new. Or you can buy a $15 External USB to PCIe NVM enclosure, and you have the added benefit of being able to repurpose your old NVMe drive as a portable USB flash drive with pretty fast transfer speeds.khanikun - Sunday, January 3, 2021 - link
I was always hoping that chip prices would drop and that's where SATA SSDs would shine. With their physically larger size, they could fit more chips in it and start replacing HDDs. Well that never seemed to have materialized.I wouldn't care if a SATA SSD wasn't as fast as some of the fastest NVMe drives, if it's got larger capacity. If they made a 6 TB SATA SSD that cost $300 and was only double the performance of a HDD, I'd buy a bunch of them now.
cyberguyz - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
There are available cheap (relatively speaking) USB 3.1 and USB-C PCIe M.2 drive enclosures that make upgrading to a larger NVMe drive a lot easier. Just pop the new drive into the enclosure and clone the existing drive over. Swap them when the copy is finished and you are done. Did this for upgrading a laptop with a small 256G pcie M.2 drive to a 1TB pcie M.2 drive. Worked well.shabby - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"So far, they have been wary of using QLC SSDs in part because they have to cover them as part of the whole system's warranty."Lol are you serious? That's funny :)
felixbrault - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
It’s true! From a warranty perspective, the battery and the ssd are the only components with a shelf life. Won’t be surprise if we start seeing TB written % in the warranty limitation (same as battery)Makaveli - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
I'm not sure about the not recommending SATA for new builds. As secondary drives they are fine. I went M2 Nvme for my boot drive and Raid 0 setup with Samsung 860 EVO for my games drives there are no hard drives in my build as I have a NAS on the network. I only have 1 m2 slot available and still 4 unused SATA ports.I will use those 4 additional sata ports before I fill the 2nd M2 slot most likely. Its only when I see games that will benefit from NVME that I will be concerned with loading them on my drive. Now if they could bring down pricing on 2TB and 4TB SATA drives that would be great.
GeoffreyA - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
Apart from the cables, nothing really wrong with SATA.Tomatotech - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
It's been impressive to see how quickly NVME has maxed out PCIe 3.0. It looks like PCIe 4.0 will also be maxed out quite quickly. Will be good to see PCIe 5.0 drives coming out sooner rather than later, though I strongly suspect it will be from the likes of AMD or Apple, not Intel.If Intel could pull a rabbit out of the hat and produce PCIe 5.0 support before everyone else, that would go a long way towards bringing them back to the top again. Will they? Probably not.
Hopefully NVME 2.0 / Zoned Namespaces will also help with the other two corners of SSD performance - random I/O performance. That's nowhere near maxing PCIe 3.0, and has a long way to go. Apple said as much when they gave their M1 chips huge registers and SSD bandwidth - there is a lot more SSDs can do to shovel random data into the CPU in the huge quantities needed.
dullard - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Intel and AMD will both likely have PCIe 5.0 in 2022. Intel might just squeak it in during the end of 2021. The first PCIe 5.0 hardware was recently successfully tested and it used Intel chips.https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/synopsys-...
Great_Scott - Sunday, January 3, 2021 - link
3D-Xpoint already excels at random low-Q depth IO without any of those optimizations. Such a shame that a technology that would excel at small drive for normal users is a expensive niche solution for businesses.James5mith - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Where is the AData drive based on the Rainer SSD controller?Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
My review sample of the ADATA Gammix S70 literally arrived without warning while I was writing this article. I had to go back and edit a statement about Innogrit controllers still being MIA. So far, it appears the only place to order one is ADATA's own online store, but they claim to be in stock.lmcd - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Imo we'll still see SATA SSDs for a while. They'll just have lower-binned NAND than NVMe. Very few systems support more than 2 NVMe disks and that's just not very much storage.name99 - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Billy, might I suggest that at some point, for interest, you run the standard AnandTech SSD benchmarks on an M1 Mac?The reason this would be interesting is this:
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/30/getting-ssd-pe...
The author is not interested in dick-measuring "proofs" of how great the SSDs are, rather he just wants a feel for how they behave under *his* standard workloads (and using standard macOS API calls, no playing around with low level calls, queue depths, etc). There are also three or four earlier articles that explain his methodology and reasoning.
Even so, the numbers he sees are fairly impressive when compared to other "laptop" SSD results; simplifying down to essentially 2.8GB/s for a range of "realistic" sizes and use patterns.
This means it would be interesting to see how those numbers compare with the drives you are benchmarking every month when running essentially the same sort of test code.
ozzuneoj86 - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"there aren't many PCs left that need a SATA SSD for an aftermarket upgrade"I seriously disagree with this statement. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of computers that exist in offices, homes or for sale on the used market that do not use M.2 drives at all, let alone NVMe. Even a bottom of the barrel DRAM-less SATA SSD will make these systems run perfectly for the average non-gamer, and will likely run acceptably for YEARS until something outright fails. I would bet that the majority of those users would notice very little difference in every day tasks (web, email, etc) if you had them upgrade to a brand new system with an NVMe SSD.
When Windows 10 no longer functions on anything older than Kaby Lake, then maybe we'll see a real decline in the need for SATA SSDs, but for now, I think demand for the drives themselves is quite high. Just because manufacturers no longer need to invest R&D money into SATA SSDs to satisfy consumers doesn't mean there is no market for the existing drives.
Take this with a grain of salt, but compare the number of user ratings of popular SATA SSDs on Amazon to the number on popular NVMe models. Most of the SATA drives have 4-8x the number of ratings, despite only being a year or two older. This isn't a guaranteed metric (too many variables) but saying that SATA drives are already becoming obsolete isn't true.
New PCs already have SSDs in them. Old PCs that don't feel fast enough (or need larger SSDs) are the ones people are upgrading... and by far the vast majority don't use NVMe.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"Everyone is finding 3D TLC NAND to be fast enough for almost every purpose, and the niche for faster-than-TLC storage options will remain tiny. There are no revolutionary new memory technologies poised to shake up the market in the near future."well, I remain convinced that at some point, solid state storage will be fast enough to support memory-to-memory ISA, i.e. directly in storage. just like in the early 80s. once that happens, lots and lots of code will be ripped out and simplified. OS writers will start pulling their hair out, of course. cpu design will be greatly simplified, what with jettisoning all those levels of cache/buffer, and transaction control (both in the RDBMS sense and general data control) will need be re-thought. if that comes about, cpu chips get really, really tiny. have you looked at how much of a current chip is some form of memory?
Duncan Macdonald - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Adding a SATA SSD is easy enough that many home users (or bright children!!) can do it. Replacing the only storage drive in a system (NVMe or SATA) requires someone who knows how to move the whole OS etc from one drive to another. This is a tedious process that often requires booting from a USB stick (or CD) to do the transfer and also often requires an external adapter to hold one of the drives during the process. Not difficult for someone with good knowledge of computers but too difficult for most home users.lmcd - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
With how few lanes are available on consumer platforms, it's hard to ask for U.2 ports. I'd love to see ITX boards start to actually use up the remaining PCIe lanes on U.2 ports, but there's barely enough lanes to populate an mATX board without spreading things pretty thin on either consumer platform!I really thought we'd start to see more lanes by now but the status quo appears to be set in stone. Hopefully AM5 will fix this mess, I doubt Intel will do so with its next platform.
lorribot - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
ITX are a bit of a problem for M2 ports as they only have one, my son recently bought a SATA SSD drive for his games as he is planning to go down the ITX root for his next build.I am sure it is not beyond the whit of the board designers to be able to offer 2 or 3 vertical M2 slots next to the main 16x PCI slot as they would be no more that standard 1x size and there is a few unused lanes on these bards. The raised position may also improve cooling.
Tomatotech - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
Some ITX boards have 2x m.2 slots, usually one on the top and one on the back of the board. They cost more though.4 or 6 SATA ports are wasted on ITX, I hope cutting that down to 1 or 2 will release space for more m.2 slots.
Side mounted / vertical m.2 slots is an interesting idea, not seen that one before. Could fit a supporting frame for 2 x m.2 drives into the space that a single flat m.2 drive takes.
name99 - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
This is not a statement about "computers" it is a statement about operating systems.I expect it's true for Linux and Windows; it's not true for Apple.
My point is not "rah rah Apple", it's that this is a problem that can be fixed, one way or another. Maybe that way is that Linux and MS get their act together? Maybe it's that Apple and Chromebooks expand to a much larger share of the market?
Even this fetishization of internal storage is a concept that's approaching its sell-by date. For almost all the use cases of large amounts of storage, connecting to external storage via TB, USB or even ethernet, is perfectly adequate. If a normal person needs more storage, the answer is to buy a USB SDD, not to dick around with popping their machine open.
GeoffreyA - Sunday, January 3, 2021 - link
"Adding a SATA SSD is easy enough"Very easy, and convenient. It will be a loss when boards get rid of SATA ports.
"move the whole OS ... this is a tedious process"
When I was a youngster, it used to bring me much joy formatting and reinstalling Windows on almost a weekly basis. Those were the 9x days. Backing up stuff to another drive. Booting with a floppy disk or the Windows CD. Using DOS to format and run setup.exe. Reading the entertaining messages MS used to put in Windows Setup. Nowadays, I shrink from even thinking about reinstalling Windows.
R3MF - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"and SSDs using Phison's E18 controller hit the market at the end of November, just in time to catch the tail end of the holiday shopping season"Sorry, they've what?
I haven't seen any e18 products available for sale in the UK...
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Sabrent started shipping almost the day that they got final firmware from Phison. Availability is definitely still limited, but at least here in the US they are in stock and available for purchase.Silver5urfer - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
I'd take an MLC SATA SSD over the overpriced, overheating QLC NVME any day.Plus bonus I get MLC SATA, Samsung 860PRO. The last best MLC drive, the NVMe TLC & QLC is only option going forward since Samsung abandoned the MLC with 980PRO. Just look a the TBW of these 860 PROs vs the TLC and QLC Is worst garbage.
8TB SSD is useless esp when I want to write a lot of data and have them near 80% full, mechanical WD RED / Seagate Exos are much much much better and cheaper options. For those with mATX and other Console type builds they have to adjust to this QLC trash only. EATX and Standard can get any number of SATA drives. Esp all the premium boards have SATA x8 connections. SATA will always be better, newer is never always good. So much of sacrifice and that SLC cache bs and ton of crap.
Unfortunately for laptops SATA Is almost done, thin and light BGA garbage sells more and Apple made people crave for that thin and light bs so Soldered SSDs and if the OEM cares about user a bit NVMe slots will exist. Even the Clevo machines are now done with SATA I guess.. a shame.
About consoles, they max around a 2070S and with unified memory arch, do they even have any inherent advantage over ? So far nothing. Load times are one of the benefits but once true next gen games hit, like UE5, Rockstar RAGE and other then we will see how Consoles handle. PC will handle always no matter what, since even in 2020 we are seeing non SSE fixes for the game exes to run the new games. But on the storage side, I do not expect any FPS improvements from SATA to NVMe to Gen 4 SSDs, maybe new Engines will change that ?
lmcd - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
Dell XPS 15 7591 shipped with an open 2.5in drive slot, which is part of why I recommended it to my partner. Still thin, around 4lbs.2.5in drives were always limited in the 13 inch laptop space. There were already designs that shipped mSATA only. The change is how many people buy 13 inch compared to 14 and 15, and how many 15 inch designs use a different platform than the 13 inch design (leaving 14 as a stretched 13, which stinks).
Tomatotech - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
“ For those with mATX and other Console type builds they have to adjust to this QLC trash only.”Eh? I was putting 5 drives in my mITX builds a couple of years ago, and mITX is far smaller than mATX.
I used the Fractal Design Node 202 which is one of the smallest mass market mITX chassis at 10 litres. 1x nvme, 3x 2.5” multi-TB HDDs, and another 2.5” SATA SDD. All went in fine, plenty of room, plus a full size 1060 GPU if desired.
MetaCube - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
NVMe overpriced bad, SATA goodmochabean - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"there aren't many PCs left that need a SATA SSD for an aftermarket upgrade"huh? nvme m.2 slots weren't widespread on desktop motherboards until about 2017 or so. this is just flat out wrong, unless people are chucking their computers in the garbage after 3 years
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
You are mistakenly presuming that the entire installed base of desktop PCs are in need of some kind of storage upgrade, or will be in the future. This is absurd. Most PCs out there already have adequate storage to finish out the useful lifespan of the system. Of the PC users whose usage will outgrow whatever SSD storage their machine already has, most can either get a hard drive for all their cold data, or they're the kind of power user who isn't running a system so old and low-end that it doesn't have any M.2 or PCIe slots to spare.lmcd - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
You're mistaken how "power users" actually buy and use systems. Hardware enthusiasts might well fit into your description of power users but it certainly doesn't describe the majority of power users. There are very few power users with unlimited money, and by contrast there are plenty of power users with older systems around that are in use and need storage upgrades at various points.Billy Tallis - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"Hardware enthusiasts" and "power users" don't overlap completely, but collectively they're still not capable of driving enough sales through aftermarket upgrades to keep SATA SSDs relevant as more than a niche curiosity in a world where the vast majority of client/consumer systems will never have more than two drives and the first one is NVMe by default because the price premium is so small. Two of the six NAND manufacturers are already done with SATA. And if you think that U.2 will ever catch on for consumer storage, your views on the market are obviously very different from how the manufacturers see it based on real sales data.lmcd - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
There is demand for a storage protocol that delivers high speeds and does not take extensive motherboard space.name99 - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
You're mistaking "power users" with "most of the installed base"...lmcd - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
SATA SSDs will be around until U.2 becomes a common port on desktop motherboards. If nothing else, it's a great place to send your bin-rejected NAND.Lucky Stripes 99 - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
The widespread adoption of U.2 outside of the enterprise space is probably going to depend much on how users' needs are met with M.2 solutions. I'm noticing that boards with two M.2 NVMe slots are becoming more common, which might be enough to satisfy most folks. I'd like to see U.2 succeed where SATA Express failed, especially for SFF PCs that lack available PCIe slots, but I suspect that USB4/TB4 may end up taking that role just due to economies of scale and being "good enough".Tomatotech - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
I really doubt that u.2 will become common. It seems to require larger motherboard ports than SATA, plus a thick expensive cable, plus u.2 still uses the 2.5” drive size. All these three things are going very much against the historical trend of fewer cables, smaller ports and reduced physical size. More likely to see increased use of multiple m.2 slots for internal storage, and a usb4/thunderbolt port provided for people who want gigantic storage.Lucky Stripes 99 - Sunday, January 3, 2021 - link
U.2 cables are expensive, but no more so than active USB4 or TB4 cables. But I do agree that M.2 PCIe adapter cards are probably going to be the cheaper option for most folks if the price of U.2 cables remain high. At least inexpensive M.2 to U.2 adapters exist for folks who want to go the U.2 route.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
When will this site’s authors recognize one of the most basic principles of business: economy of scale?QLC only offers 30% higher density than TLC and comes with big drawbacks thanks to it having twice as many voltage states (16). That’s called diminished returns.
QLC is being pushed by manufacturers because it’s higher margins for them, not because it’s a better technology for us.
Economy of scale is one of the tools being used against consumer value in this case. The more QLC is made instead of TLC, the worse value TLC becomes.
Consumers are supposed to drive the market but corporations rely on asymmetric information (consumer ignorance via marketing strategy) and limited competition (often, as tech is loaded with low-competition areas) to drive the market instead.
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
"Consumers are supposed to drive the market but corporations rely on asymmetric information "from the beginning, the PC revolution had/has two tracks: bidnezz (exemplified by 1-2-3 and DOS) and consumer with Apple. near as I can tell, that bifurcation still exists. over time, consumers, looking for job skills, got 1-2-3 (and some kind of wordprocessing) by hook or by crook and kept the revolution going. these days it appears that the gulf between the two camps is ever wider. IOW, how many consumers, these days, are getting aholt of bidnezz applications in order to progress in the workplace?
bansheexyz - Wednesday, December 30, 2020 - link
If there are still no durability issues experienced during ownership, then 30% is a real return and not one that comes at some realized cost.It's logically stupid to not recognize this considering that TLC is less durable than MLC, and MLC is less durable than SLC. Capacity gains across all cell types increases drive lifespan, as it reduces the frequency of each cell being rewritten. This, QLC will replace TLC for the same reason TLC replaced MLC, and PLC will eventually replace QLC.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
'30% is a real return' that comes at twice as many voltage states. Voltage states are not a free lunch. Going to 16 states is diminished returns.'It's logically stupid to not recognize this considering that TLC is less durable than MLC, and MLC is less durable than SLC. Capacity gains across all cell types increases drive lifespan, as it reduces the frequency of each cell being rewritten.'
30% capacity is below the cost of doubling the number of voltage states. It's already in the diminished returns category.
By your 'logic' we can just happily skip QLC entirely and go to sixteen layer NAND. Why not? Think of all that free density!
FunBunny2 - Friday, January 1, 2021 - link
" '30% is a real return' that comes at twice as many voltage states. Voltage states are not a free lunch. Going to 16 states is diminished returns. "presumably, one hopes, the engineers at these NAND makers have done the arithmetic, in the statistical sense, to understand the balance between increasing number of voltage states per cell with the degradation of said states over time. IOW, has it been shown that over-provisioning from the increased density, out weighs the decreases in lifetime due to loss of precision from these ever narrower voltage spans and loss of P/E cycles? we do know (yes?) that both P/E cycles and warranty periods have declined in lock-step from SLC to QLC.
Silver5urfer - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
Very well said.GeoffreyA - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
I generally agree about QLC being rubbish, though the maths does say that these drives should last beyond the life of one's computer: decades. That's theory; it would be nice if someone did an actual endurance experiment, like Techreport's in 2015, so that QLC can show us what it's made of.As for diminishing returns, agreed. Practically everything in life is subject to this law. Quite likely, after adding a few more bits, they'll reach a limit and will have to resort to more layers and other stacking tricks, till some new technology comes out. I suppose in computers it's always been like that: killing it with the big gains, then painfully squeezing out every last drop, then some new insight throwing open the gates.
It looks as if QLC will become the "mainstream" option in time and TLC some sort of "Pro" variant (didn't Samsung do something like that recently?). Sadly, that's how it goes in this greedy world, and I say that with a deep sigh.
GeoffreyA - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
As Anand once said (I think): "There are no bad products. Just bad prices."QLC's problem is that. People should boycott these drives till the price equals the quality.
umano - Thursday, December 31, 2020 - link
Dunno people, I had 4 different ssd's, and even all tlc's were used for cache or storage, the experience was in some case disappointing. The 850 evo 120 gb used for cache after 16 month was so slow I had to remove it. The first one was an OCZ and again less than 2 years and it became terribly slow. The 860 evo 256gb is still working but it almost halved its 4kRND q1t1. The 840 pro 256 is still working, I used it till this may as w10 drive, consistent performance, and reliability well over its declared endurance. All the drive have/had from 15 to 20% overprovisioning.I would love to buy new gen optane
Diji1 - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
Drives below 512GB typically suffer from lower speeds because they have less NAND modules to read from simultaneously.six_tymes - Friday, January 1, 2021 - link
I hope to see Intel's newest 3D XPoint consumer drives this year, and I also hope they'll have nvme 2 spec. I have been saving up each month for a boot drive.Slash3 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
...welp.RIP client Optane.
Farfolomew - Friday, January 1, 2021 - link
This was a really well-written article, not overly technical, but also very informative. Thanks!realbabilu - Friday, January 1, 2021 - link
Any news about endurance ssd tech? One of my sata ssd somehow sudden broken, heating and made notebook motherboard crashed also.29a - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
The QLC FUD is ridiculous. I bought a 2TB 660p in 2018, the drive has been 50-65% full the whole time and works great.Deicidium369 - Sunday, January 3, 2021 - link
I still have a 120GB OCZ that I bought when I built my 2500K system way back when - used there for over 5 years and more than year on another system - drive testing didn't reveal any issues or lower capacity - the durability concerns are way over blownAlexvrb - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
PCIe 4.0 NVMe shootout when? :PDiji1 - Saturday, January 2, 2021 - link
It was my understanding that moving from SATA to NVMe does almost nothing for Windows and game loading times and anecdotally this seems to be the case for me.It would be nice to see some clarification given the article claims NVMe has higher performance - which it does in some situations, don't get me wrong, but many users do not have these situations.
GeoffreyA - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Appears to be faster mainly in file copying (drastically), professional editing, and things like that; and only slightly faster in other tasks. Haven't used one, so just speaking from what I've read. I suppose, depending on one's tasks, a SATA SSD will give one 80-90% the performance of an NVMe drive. Techpowerup has some nice real-world tests:https://www.techpowerup.com/review/crucial-p5-1tb-...
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/samsung-970-evo...
Eskimonster - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
i use an old 3770k, i added a pcie adaptor to m.2 cost me 5 $. works just fine.Hrunga_Zmuda - Tuesday, January 5, 2021 - link
Got my M1 MacBook Pro on December 21, which uses PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs. I went from the top Intel MacBook Pro (i9 15" 32 gigs RAM) to this entry-level Mac because the warranty was running out and I was a bit worried about the expense of replacing the keyboard. Apple actually offered me a lot more for trade-in than I thought I could get. They beat all the independent trade-in companies by a lot (up to $400 more). Anyway, the drive is vastly faster, and the computer just seems like a speed leap of more like two or three generations. And I'm betting a big part of that is two-fold. The United Memory Architecture, plus the PCIe 4.0 SSD seem to me to be the future of all computers that are going to be competitive. The old system bus will be on life support in the not-too-distant future.