Yup, I picked up a 960GB SSD for $195 around Christmas. Its not a top rated one but I don't care for the purpose I needed it. 2TB at that price this next Christmas should be reasonable.
The prices actually have flattened quite a lot lately. Samsung 850 EVO with 512GB has been under $150 for over one year now, and offers excellent price/performance. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would by this drive at $166. I am sure that the price will keep going down, but the rate has slowed dramatically in the last couple of years.
It's not true that prices haven't dropped, they did plenty. Samsung never really had good prices, they were pushing TLC when others didn't had that and it only created the illusion that they have good prices. Now when others have TLC too, the Samsung price premium is more obvious.
Sandisk ( they have the NAND JV with Toshiba) said that 15nm yields are the best they ever had on any process. We also know that die size wise in 2D they lead - in 3D costs are much higher and hard to figure out who leads.
OCZ's newer drives are fine. Barefoot 3 is a little old school and the Trion drives are kind of a joke performance-wise, but all of them have been very reliable.
I am a personal fan of the OCZ ARC100 drives, they are incredibly cheap, very fast and very reliable. Just don't put them in a laptop because the controller doesn't support DevSleep.
I am curious whether we'll see more/bigger DDR3 based caches across various devices. I would expect when the demand for DDR3 as a motherboard RAM starts to rapidly decline for sake of DDR4, there could be a surplus of chips for some time.
xpoint cache would be more interesting. a bit of DDR would be good since it is faster but a few GB of xpoint could add a boost and it being non volatile helps too.
It wouldn't be 1.5GB/s in real life, unless the spec was significantly changed. SATA III is 6Gbps (750MB/s), but after 8b/10b encoding and other overheads the maximum real world performance is ~550MB/s. I.e. SATA IV, at 12Gbps raw transfer rate, would be capable of about 1GB/s, which is one third of what PCIe 3.0 x4 is capable of delivering in real world.
@Kristian Vättö: "It wouldn't be 1.5GB/s in real life, unless the spec was significantly changed ... SATA IV, at 12Gbps raw transfer rate, would be capable of about 1GB/s ..."
I does seem likely that the 8b/10b encoding scheme will persist through the next iteration of SATA given that SAS-3 12Gbps is already available and uses it. This would put a theoretical cap of 1.25GB/s performance. I'm not sure if other overhead scales linearly or even at all, so it is harder for me to say exactly where I would expect the practical limits to be. SAS-4 is apparently moving to a 128b/150b scheme, so that would be the alternate best guess, but I wouldn't expect it. It would only bring the theoretical cap up to 1.28GB/s anyways.
That all said, you can only fit a limited number of M.2 sticks on a motherboard. I'm sure some people wouldn't mind sacrificing PCIe slots, but others will want them for GPUs or other add-on cards. I don't see either of these supplanting SATA for volume use, though I expect it for laptops and perhaps small form factor devices. I would consider U.2 (SFF-8639) as the logical successor to SATA if only it would start picking up a little traction in the market. That said, SATA express doesn't seem to be getting any traction either, so who knows if an SATA-4 will do any better. With so much of the market switching to mobile and small form factor devices that can't support many storage devices, it's possible that SATA gets replaced with SAS.
I would argue that, if they are going to release another SATA standard, they need to do it quickly to maintain relevance. Otherwise it will be entirely supplanted by U.2 or SAS. Mobile and small form factor devices are likely already lost to the smaller profiles storage devices like M.2. Of course, there are always spinning disks, but SATA-3 seems to be well more than capable of handling them and a new SATA standard would just push cost up unnecessarily.
Remember that in order to utilize more than three SATA IV (assuming 1GB/s) at full speed, the DMI interface between the CPU and PCH would also need to be upgraded. DMI 3.0 is essentially just four PCIe 3.0 lanes, so without PCIe 4.0 there would have to be eight 3.0 lanes dedicated to DMI, which would be away from the other PCIe lanes (or increased die complexity and size). In other words, you would still be sacrificing PCIe lanes with SATA IV, and on the downside you would need three drives to match the performance of one PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD.
As you said, SATA III is still more than fine for volume use. The applications that require or benefit from multiple GB/s volume storage are quite rare, and the users likely have a workstation anyway with plenty of PCIe lanes for PCIe SSDs.
I was lucky enough to pick up a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 for xmas last year, and I can tell you from hitting it hard that thermal throttling is not an issue, and it's one of the fastest components I've ever owned (in terms of jump from my last drive, and relative to the other parts of a modern skylake system). But I hear you on the RAID -- I don't think the Intel RS controller even supports raid on PCIe/NVMe devices, even for those motherboards that have 2+ M.2 ports.
@jabber: "Exactly, if you want to run more than say three drives then PCIe etc. isn't going to cut it. SATA IV will have to come."
Rather than wait on a standard that may or may not be coming, you could use SAS (a bit expensive I know), or U.2 (hopefully more players come to the market soon), or you could ask yourself if your third or more drive and really needs performance beyond SATA-3. Magnetic storage certainly doesn't and a Samsung 850Pro (and many competitors) put up a pretty decent showing of performance. While none of these solutions are perfect, they are all available today. On top of that, they downside of U.2 is the same as SATA-4 (availability) and it is both faster (if SATA-4 holds to the past upgrade pattern) and has a head start on SATA-4.
@boeush: "If you wanted to build a PB-class RAID-10 blazing-fast monster, then something like SATA IV might be the only reasonable way..."
If they keep with the same upgrade pattern, SATA-4 would clock in at 12Gbps (1.25GB/s with encoding scheme). PCIe 3.0 x4 runs 32Gbps (3.94GB/s with encoding scheme). With two M.2 (4 lane) slots, you can run RAID-1. I would argue that you are better off running one M.2 drive than running two SATA-4 devices in RAID-0 under the above assumptions as you are getting less performance and more points of failure. Therefore, an M.2 RAID-1 setup is not only another reasonable option, but even more of a "blazing-fast monster" than a theoretical SATA-4 RAID-10 setup (and more reliable).
Side Note: Spinning disk is currently the way to go for capacity, but you certainly won't be blazing fast regardless of your setup. Also, business and data centers will probably continue to use SAS over SATA, so business class Network Attached Storage or Storage Area Networks are out of the question.
Heh, I spoke too soon. Checking Wikipedia, SATA 3.2 standard provides 16 Gbit/s (1.97 GB/s) and was released in 2013. Just a matter of people actually implementing the standard...
SATA 3.2 is SATA Express, i.e. PCIe x2. Nobody implemented that because of the x2 limitation. There's no "real" SATA IV in the horizon.
Client PCIe SSDs are still in their early stages. Capacities of M.2 SSDs are increasing thanks to 3D NAND scaling and if U.2 every takes off, then there will be plenty of 2.5" PCIe SSDs delivering the same capacities that 2.5" SATA SSDs do. The thermal problem would similarly apply to SATA IV drives (and is one of the reasons why such spec wasn't developed), there's nothing that makes heat a PCIe-specific problem.
The 16Gbps link specified in the SATA 3.2 standard is just SATA Express. It's electrically a PCIe link, and physically the connector standard was dead on arrival.
SAS-3 has a 12Gbps speed, but nobody's planning to bring that to the consumer space. They're also working on a standard for 22.5Gbps SAS-4, but that's even less likely to affect the consumer space and might not even matter to the enterprise space given how well NVMe is catching on there.
I just got my first ever pop up ad on Anandtech, the kind of javascript modal dialog trying to sell me a Samsung SSD. Is this going to be common in the future here, or was that a fluke that slipped through? Sites that care about their users don't use intrusive ads like that.
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nathanddrews - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Sweet, keep racing to the bottom, guys! Help bring down NAND prices and get me some 2TB SSDs under $300!ImSpartacus - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Yeah, maybe by 2020, lol.DanNeely - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Probably sometime next year. 1TB @ $300 is possible today.jjj - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Seen 960 GB deals slightly bellow 200$ around Black Friday.2TB TLC under 300$ might be reachable late this year, depends how the global economy does.
Reflex - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Yup, I picked up a 960GB SSD for $195 around Christmas. Its not a top rated one but I don't care for the purpose I needed it. 2TB at that price this next Christmas should be reasonable.Samus - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
I just picked up a 960GB Sandisk SSD at Newegg for $225. Wasn't even on sale. We will probably have 2TB for $300 by the end of the year.yankeeDDL - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
The prices actually have flattened quite a lot lately. Samsung 850 EVO with 512GB has been under $150 for over one year now, and offers excellent price/performance. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would by this drive at $166.I am sure that the price will keep going down, but the rate has slowed dramatically in the last couple of years.
jjj - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
It's not true that prices haven't dropped, they did plenty.Samsung never really had good prices, they were pushing TLC when others didn't had that and it only created the illusion that they have good prices. Now when others have TLC too, the Samsung price premium is more obvious.
damianrobertjones - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
They could be that price today but... we keep buying and they keep making little small steps forward to ensure max $$$$WorldWithoutMadness - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Good... use more toshiba, let them bleed more money, OCZ curse still persist.JK, I don't even know their detailed financial report.
jjj - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Sandisk ( they have the NAND JV with Toshiba) said that 15nm yields are the best they ever had on any process. We also know that die size wise in 2D they lead - in 3D costs are much higher and hard to figure out who leads.Samus - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
OCZ's newer drives are fine. Barefoot 3 is a little old school and the Trion drives are kind of a joke performance-wise, but all of them have been very reliable.I am a personal fan of the OCZ ARC100 drives, they are incredibly cheap, very fast and very reliable. Just don't put them in a laptop because the controller doesn't support DevSleep.
WorldWithoutMadness - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
I was implying the Toshiba's recent accounting scandal.HollyDOL - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
I am curious whether we'll see more/bigger DDR3 based caches across various devices. I would expect when the demand for DDR3 as a motherboard RAM starts to rapidly decline for sake of DDR4, there could be a surplus of chips for some time.hojnikb - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Those chips will be eaten by stuff like ssds (they use dram too), phones, tablets...jjj - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
xpoint cache would be more interesting.a bit of DDR would be good since it is faster but a few GB of xpoint could add a boost and it being non volatile helps too.
jabber - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
When do we get SATA IV?Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Not anytime soon, if ever, because PCIe and NVMe are the future.patrickjp93 - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Eh, at 12Gbps, that's 1.5 GB/s, so that would be plenty for most consumer uses for a good, long while.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
It wouldn't be 1.5GB/s in real life, unless the spec was significantly changed. SATA III is 6Gbps (750MB/s), but after 8b/10b encoding and other overheads the maximum real world performance is ~550MB/s. I.e. SATA IV, at 12Gbps raw transfer rate, would be capable of about 1GB/s, which is one third of what PCIe 3.0 x4 is capable of delivering in real world.BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 15, 2016 - link
@Kristian Vättö: "It wouldn't be 1.5GB/s in real life, unless the spec was significantly changed ... SATA IV, at 12Gbps raw transfer rate, would be capable of about 1GB/s ..."I does seem likely that the 8b/10b encoding scheme will persist through the next iteration of SATA given that SAS-3 12Gbps is already available and uses it. This would put a theoretical cap of 1.25GB/s performance. I'm not sure if other overhead scales linearly or even at all, so it is harder for me to say exactly where I would expect the practical limits to be. SAS-4 is apparently moving to a 128b/150b scheme, so that would be the alternate best guess, but I wouldn't expect it. It would only bring the theoretical cap up to 1.28GB/s anyways.
That all said, you can only fit a limited number of M.2 sticks on a motherboard. I'm sure some people wouldn't mind sacrificing PCIe slots, but others will want them for GPUs or other add-on cards. I don't see either of these supplanting SATA for volume use, though I expect it for laptops and perhaps small form factor devices. I would consider U.2 (SFF-8639) as the logical successor to SATA if only it would start picking up a little traction in the market. That said, SATA express doesn't seem to be getting any traction either, so who knows if an SATA-4 will do any better. With so much of the market switching to mobile and small form factor devices that can't support many storage devices, it's possible that SATA gets replaced with SAS.
I would argue that, if they are going to release another SATA standard, they need to do it quickly to maintain relevance. Otherwise it will be entirely supplanted by U.2 or SAS. Mobile and small form factor devices are likely already lost to the smaller profiles storage devices like M.2. Of course, there are always spinning disks, but SATA-3 seems to be well more than capable of handling them and a new SATA standard would just push cost up unnecessarily.
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Remember that in order to utilize more than three SATA IV (assuming 1GB/s) at full speed, the DMI interface between the CPU and PCH would also need to be upgraded. DMI 3.0 is essentially just four PCIe 3.0 lanes, so without PCIe 4.0 there would have to be eight 3.0 lanes dedicated to DMI, which would be away from the other PCIe lanes (or increased die complexity and size). In other words, you would still be sacrificing PCIe lanes with SATA IV, and on the downside you would need three drives to match the performance of one PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD.As you said, SATA III is still more than fine for volume use. The applications that require or benefit from multiple GB/s volume storage are quite rare, and the users likely have a workstation anyway with plenty of PCIe lanes for PCIe SSDs.
boeush - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
PCIe and NVMe are fine if you only want one or two drives of relatively lower capacity and thermally limited performance in your system.If you wanted to build a PB-class RAID-10 blazing-fast monster, then something like SATA IV might be the only reasonable way...
dakishimesan - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
I was lucky enough to pick up a Samsung 950 Pro M.2 for xmas last year, and I can tell you from hitting it hard that thermal throttling is not an issue, and it's one of the fastest components I've ever owned (in terms of jump from my last drive, and relative to the other parts of a modern skylake system). But I hear you on the RAID -- I don't think the Intel RS controller even supports raid on PCIe/NVMe devices, even for those motherboards that have 2+ M.2 ports.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
Skylake and Z170 chipset brought RAID support for PCIe SSDs.http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Triple-M2-Sam...
jabber - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
Exactly, if you want to run more than say three drives then PCIe etc. isn't going to cut it. SATA IV will have to come.BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 15, 2016 - link
@jabber: "Exactly, if you want to run more than say three drives then PCIe etc. isn't going to cut it. SATA IV will have to come."Rather than wait on a standard that may or may not be coming, you could use SAS (a bit expensive I know), or U.2 (hopefully more players come to the market soon), or you could ask yourself if your third or more drive and really needs performance beyond SATA-3. Magnetic storage certainly doesn't and a Samsung 850Pro (and many competitors) put up a pretty decent showing of performance. While none of these solutions are perfect, they are all available today. On top of that, they downside of U.2 is the same as SATA-4 (availability) and it is both faster (if SATA-4 holds to the past upgrade pattern) and has a head start on SATA-4.
BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 15, 2016 - link
@boeush: "If you wanted to build a PB-class RAID-10 blazing-fast monster, then something like SATA IV might be the only reasonable way..."If they keep with the same upgrade pattern, SATA-4 would clock in at 12Gbps (1.25GB/s with encoding scheme). PCIe 3.0 x4 runs 32Gbps (3.94GB/s with encoding scheme). With two M.2 (4 lane) slots, you can run RAID-1. I would argue that you are better off running one M.2 drive than running two SATA-4 devices in RAID-0 under the above assumptions as you are getting less performance and more points of failure. Therefore, an M.2 RAID-1 setup is not only another reasonable option, but even more of a "blazing-fast monster" than a theoretical SATA-4 RAID-10 setup (and more reliable).
BurntMyBacon - Monday, February 15, 2016 - link
Side Note: Spinning disk is currently the way to go for capacity, but you certainly won't be blazing fast regardless of your setup. Also, business and data centers will probably continue to use SAS over SATA, so business class Network Attached Storage or Storage Area Networks are out of the question.boeush - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Heh, I spoke too soon. Checking Wikipedia, SATA 3.2 standard provides 16 Gbit/s (1.97 GB/s) and was released in 2013. Just a matter of people actually implementing the standard...Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
SATA 3.2 is SATA Express, i.e. PCIe x2. Nobody implemented that because of the x2 limitation. There's no "real" SATA IV in the horizon.Client PCIe SSDs are still in their early stages. Capacities of M.2 SSDs are increasing thanks to 3D NAND scaling and if U.2 every takes off, then there will be plenty of 2.5" PCIe SSDs delivering the same capacities that 2.5" SATA SSDs do. The thermal problem would similarly apply to SATA IV drives (and is one of the reasons why such spec wasn't developed), there's nothing that makes heat a PCIe-specific problem.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
The 16Gbps link specified in the SATA 3.2 standard is just SATA Express. It's electrically a PCIe link, and physically the connector standard was dead on arrival.SAS-3 has a 12Gbps speed, but nobody's planning to bring that to the consumer space. They're also working on a standard for 22.5Gbps SAS-4, but that's even less likely to affect the consumer space and might not even matter to the enterprise space given how well NVMe is catching on there.
nerd1 - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
I'd rather buy 40nm 3D NAND TLC instead.icrf - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
I just got my first ever pop up ad on Anandtech, the kind of javascript modal dialog trying to sell me a Samsung SSD. Is this going to be common in the future here, or was that a fluke that slipped through? Sites that care about their users don't use intrusive ads like that.Kristian Vättö - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
You should email Ryan about it and send him a screenshot if possible.ryan.smith[AT]anandtech.com
icrf - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
Thanks, I'll try to keep that in mind if I see it again.