Nope. Back in 2013-14, there was a new standard named "SATA Express", but it never gained any traction in the marketplace. That's why SSDs have moved to the M.2 form factor, with the PCIe interface. There's much more bandwidth:
I have a SATA Express laptop! The complete lack of drives for the form factor aside from the one it shipped with (an OEM-specific Toshiba XG3 iirc) is somewhat annoying - but luckily there's an M.2 adapter available in a pinch.
Sata Express isn't even really an update of SATA. They just added the ability to run 2 PCIe lanes instead of a SATA link down the cable; effectively making it equivalent to a low end m.2 drive.
even hobby builders who upgrade their components often are likely to touch that maybe once every year at most. And the motherboard is unlikely to last more than 5 years if they're that upgrade-crazy.
well what about M.2 replace SD standard ? Maybe it can becomes pro-level video camera storage. Having 50 cycles of hot swap seems to be mis-opportunity.
why would they need that? Why are you creating problem when it's not there? M.2 can't hotswap at all. It's physically too big. You'll need to completely redesign the physical and protocol layer. Why wouldn't you just use SD Express?
I mean... with SATA drives/cables, then you need to unhook and reattach them all the time because the wires get in the way. m.2 is just on the mobo, so you don't need to ever mess with it unless the mobo is being replaced, or you are upgrading.
My motherboard has SATA Express support. Not a SATA upgrade as much as a kind-of-hybrid between SATA and NVMe. But yes I see what you mean. It failed miserably though.
I think SATA is dead. Even with a newer version it's still a terrible interface for drives. Not only it doesn't provide power (so you need a separate cable from the PSU), but the drive itself needs a box and the whole thing takes a lot of space (often wasted inside - you could literally cut some SSD in half and it would still work :D). Whereas NVMe is chip only, super small, power included. No wasted cables or materials and it's connected with PCIe just like everything else.
Except at the silly fringe that doesn't matter though. A sata drive packing more flash than can fit into an m.2 is going to be crazy expensive for a consumer model; and in the enterprise market taking several times longer than an m.2 drive to fill (think initial fill or raid rebuilds) is a major liability.
If you have a 44TB DB that would be placed on a physical SAN typically. The only other possibility is the entire DB is a physical appliance. Either way the server will have multiple 2.5" drive bays. Depending on the age of the server, those slots will either be SATA/SAS, SATA/SAS/NVMe, or strictly NVMe. Either way both SAS and NVMe have drives larger than 15TB. Outside of one company (and that is a 3.5" SSD), the largest Enterprise grade SATA SSD are 7.68TB now. Sure you can purchase older ones on SATA that are larger, but with the rapid adoption of NVMe there isn't any reason to go SATA unless absolutely required. Also when it comes to cost, SATA Enterprise SSD isn't much cheaper than Enterprise NVMe, SAS is still overpriced though.
"It isn't a silly fringe thing" and then proceeds to put forward an extremely fringe case. Just how many people have a 44TB DB laying around their house? This is consumer equipment. Don't put a 44TB DB on consumer equipment!
44TB? That is small potatoes. I’m dealing with storage requirements in double digits of PB annually. Certainly not consumer level when just drives cost in the millions.
For home use I rely on the hot plug feature of SATA. For the hot plug feature I’ll be switching to USB C, USB 4 or thunderbolt 3 or 4. I still don’t have an M.2 Drive, but likely the next system upgrade will include an M.2 for the OS. SATA is getting to be too slow.
As for the Samsung drives. I recently upgraded an aging laptop’s mechanical drive with the EVO 870 simply, because the 860 had too long of a shipping time.
I also almost exclusively use Samsung drives in upgrades, because of how well the Samsung data migration tool works. I have tried Acronis and use clonezilla, both have created unusable clones on occasion. Samsung’s Data Migration just works, even on a running system.
But they are using SATA, nobody said it's single drive. It's how much storage you can fit into a 1U rack that matters, SATA is the only choice at the moment.
That is 100% false. NVMe is only surface area limited in the M.2 form factor. However, 99% of users do not need more than a 4TB NVMe SSD. Those that need larger drives can use M.2 > U.2 converters and get much larger SSDs.
Yeah well, look into most SATA SSDs, their PCB isnt bigger than that of a M.2 SSD. Plus M.3 is coming = more space. Also theres U.2, which pretty much allows to use 2.5"-sized SSDs to be used (even on a M.2 connector). SATA is dead. And they know it, else they would have released a new standard very long ago.
not really? You are typically limited to 8 or 16 chips with most SSDs, and you can hold that on a long double-sided m.2 just fine. If you are going with more than that then you are looking something extremely custom with a built in raid of some sort and that is going to be stupidly expensive and not for the consumer market. Just look at the pic of that 4TB board. Maybe 4 storage modules in it assuming there are 2 more on the other side? You can easily fit that on m.2 with room to spare.
SATA as an SSD interface is going nowhere. SATA as an HDD interface probably has 5-10 years left before the price crossover finally kills spinning rust off.
If at some point in the future we do see a new SATA spec; it'll be because mass market spinning rust for NASes has gotten fast enough to bottleneck: In which case they'll backport the faster transport parts of the 2x as fast SAS standard to make SATA4.
SATA at this point is need of major changes to keep up. They can't do a minor refresh at this point. With that in mind, I hope they change the cable so that it incorporates power into it as well. And they've got to shoot for something like 50Gb/s.
At this point the latest USB spec is faster and provides power in a similar sized port. SATA should be able to beat that and it's a shame they haven't done so yet.
They made a major update. No one cares about SATA Express. That you don't even know about it only goes to show that no one cares, there's no need or use for it.
SATA is plenty enough for Hard Drives, and SSD's are going to keep using M.2, U.3, and other PCIe ports. There's no need for a port that isn't going to be used by anyone.
If anything, they could theoretically run spinning rust off an x1 PCIe 3.0 (Or even 2.0) connector, but that's also not really needed.
If you want consumer motherboards to have U.3 connectors, then say that. And I'd agree. I never like bare PCB's where they're not necessary.
I ABSOLUTELY want U.2 connectors on motherboards, and U.2 drives priced for mass-market sales.
It won't happen, because the manufacturers want a hard line drawn between home-use and business-use hardware so they can price-gouge for business hardware. Mass-market U.2 drives would ruin their pricing strategy.
Consumer U.2 drives wouldn't ruin the enterprise SSD market, because the form factor is a much less important difference than the fact that consumer SSDs have SLC caching and enterprise SSDs don't.
Consumer U.2 drives would fail because the market is simply too small. The number of consumers who can actually afford and want 3+ NVMe SSDs in their desktop (and aren't already on a HEDT system) is too small to justify bringing a new category of products to market.
The suggestion for hard drives was to double the amount of heads/platters per drive to get costs down even further, I think this decreases reliability too but reduces overhead costs for datacenters because it's fewer drives.
8 tb, 10 TB and 12 TB drives are more expensive per gb than the two terabyte drives.... Prices haven't gone down since 2010. I should be able to walk in and get a 8tb drive for $89. The markets really crapped out.
HDD prices never really recovered after the 2011 floods in Thailand. By the time the impact was over, SSDs were eating their lunch, and the incentive to keep dropping prices went away forever.
At the time SATA was developed, it made sense. Times of course have changed with SATA now feeling more of a legacy technology. It'll continue to hang around as the protocols it was built upon (AHCI etc.) are present in legacy OS where as NVMe support may not be there. Similarly there is no support for removable media though leveraging USB for that now is trivial. Main barrier for the formal death of SATA is still cost as NVMe still carries a slight premium over SATA and consumer systems have limited PCIe connectivity.
The main barrier for the formal death of SATA are hundreds of millions of perfectly usable older systems that don't support NVME or have limited NVME slots.
" Main barrier for the formal death of SATA is still cost as NVMe still carries a slight premium over SATA and consumer systems have limited PCIe connectivity. "
i think you might be also forgetting the aspect of the space requirements of the nvme connector as well.
I've always thought SATA was a mistake. Removing the ability to chain multiple drives made for an ugly cabling situation, and the connectors are flimsy as hell. The new power connector in particular served no purpose whatsoever aside from annoyance.
If it had used more robust connectors and allowed chaining drives, it would've been fantastic. But that would've been to much like the right decision for them to entertain it.
SATA on the desktop and in NAS boxes is still very much alive, TYVM.
Sata SSDs will continue to be made and sold as long as there are older computers in use that have a SATA bay in them. My main computer only has 1 NVME slot, but it also has a SATA bay. WIthout that SATA bay I'd have to have all my files crammed onto on a single SSD.
SATA is still perfectly fine for old spinning rust drives. Sure the burst performance could be better with a faster connection... but how often is that needed? For sustained data transfers SATA3 is still faster than any spinning drives on the market that cap out at 150-200MBps on a good day.
I don't think SATA is going to go away anytime soon. While it is not as fast as a good NVME SSD, it makes up for it by offering a good price to capacity ratio. It just like why mechanical drive still exists today. Most NVME SSDs are affordable up to around 1TB, and at higher capacity, the prices goes up significantly. Also one is usually limited to 2 or 3 NVME slots due to limitation of number of PCI-E lanes. Thus, having the SATA ports to supplement additional storage is unlikely to go away, at least from a desktop perspective.
SATA is necessary if you need multiple drives. I only have two M.2 slots on my motherboard but numerous SATA ports. I have a 512GB boot drive and 1TB data drive in both slots. I need more storage so I have a couple 2TB SATA SSD's connected.
You're confusing SATA with the disk form factor. There are SATA M.2 drive, SATA 2.5" drives and SATA 3.5" drives. SATA M.2 drives get their power from the same connector, by the way.
The box size has little to do with the interface, more to do with case compatibility. Cases which are built to house multiple drives have spaces set up for them. That's a standard and both cases and drives are designed for it. The drive could theoretically be designed to be smaller (and there were 1.8" drives in the past).
A shame the 3 TB version is 379 USD to expensive. This will never work unless price per GB falls to a quarter of today's, and reliability data retention wise gets at least on par with the spinners. 479 for 4TB is just ridiculous.
SSDs can do 3000mb/s or a lot more with parallelization and raid, you could probably get 30,000mb/s or some insane number like that, eventually with a single SSD.
It's a little weird that we don't have better cables.
It's interesting to see the SATA market deteriorate.
I don't understand how most PCs can get away with two or one physical drive slots, but assuming that remains the trend, I wonder what NAS owners are going to do once SSDs are cheap and large enough to use for RAID but there aren't any products to use for it...
IIRC, USB is one channel one way at a time, which makes it less responsive than SATA (which is bidirectional), even though USB has higher bandwidth on paper.
10Gbps USB is already twice as fast as 6Gbps SATA because it uses more efficient encoding. 20Gbps USB is available right now, and 40Gbps is part of the USB 4 spec though I don't know how widespread support for it is.
U.3 is probably only going to be around for two or three product cycles. It's very much a stopgap solution to unify U.2 and SAS, both of which are already on the way out in favor of EDSFF.
Not really. All drives (IDE / SATA / NVMe / USB / Whatever) pretty much just work. The problem is the OS may not boot. When switching to a different protocol (say SATA to NVMe), you increase chances it won't boot. Linux is easier to get to boot than Windows when changing the drive to a different system.
Agreed...;) I might say "UEFI vs. Legacy," though. And much of it has to do with the knowledge, experience, and skill of the computer operator...! No question about that. (It's actually MBR vs. GPT--GPT is better. All of my SATA HDDs are formatted GPT, etc. I have no MBR-formatted drives.)
The list of NVMe drives here is curious. Where is the 980 Pro from Samsung?--been selling for a while now--one of several PCIe4 NVMe drives available. Makes me question when this article was actually written....? It seems incomplete or out of date. Samsung is a chip company no longer in the business of making platter drives (last I looked, anyway-do they still sell the Spinpoints?), so it's natural for them to sell SSDs of varying types, sizes, and prices, imo.
I deliberately chose not to include 980 PRO results in the graphs for this review, because that's a silly comparison to make against a SATA drive. But if you really care, you can use Bench: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2724?vs=27...
A half-decent UEFI implementation will enumerate the bootloaders (or fall back to the default /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi path) if the drive isn't configured in the motherboard.
Unfortunately, "half-decent" can't be taken for granted. The ASRock motherboard in the new SSD testbed won't look in the standard path for a bootloader, but it will happily boot any Windows bootloader it finds.
SATA may be declining but is far from dead - many motherboards (and laptops) only have one NVMe slot - adding a SATA drive is far easier than replacing the NVMe drive when it is the system drive. Also NVMe drives bigger than 4TB are rare and expensive so anyone needing large storage capacity (over 4TB) has a choice between SATA or expensive NVMe.
These SATA circuit board PCBs are really tiny. I’ve sometimes wondered about removing the PCB from the drive and just plugging it direct into the motherboard SATA socket, no cable or drive case needed. This wouldn’t work out of the box as I think the motherboard port and the drive’s port are both the same gender.
So this would need 1) a small gender changer intermediary, and 2) a way to get the power cable in there as well. Depending on the orientation of the motherboard SATA port, there might be space next to it for the power cable.
If SATA drive manufacturers added a secondary power port at the top of the PCB (which they won’t do) and included a small cheap gender changer for the data port, this could become a feasible life extender for using SATA in small or crowded cases.
Funnily enough, that exists as a product already. Search for "disk on module". While more commonly known for the older IDE interface, SATA versions do exist.
You could, of course, recreate it with an off-the-shelf SATA drive, a screwdriver, and a light touch of solder.
Cant wait for a 980 EVO, because the price for this 4 TB one is pretty good, which will probably not be much different on an M.2 version. And even if, comparable M.2 drives with only 2 TB cost around $400.
I guess you don't know how to use file sharing features in the OS over gigabit Ethernet or WiFi. You're the only one that still find hot plug useful. Please don't comment for the rest of us.
I still occasionally use SATA SSDs as if they were floppies, since all of my desktops have hot-swap bays. But its becoming more common that I use M.2 NVMe SSDs in USB enclosures. Either solution is preferable to WiFi or gigE when transferring tens of GB or more.
How many grannies or grandpas need more than what SATA offers in the machines they use to go online for email, Facebook, or Amazon? Even if they stream videos their systems are ok using hardware a couple steps behind state of the art! SATA will linger for several more years.
The thing that gets me is that just because a drive is U.2 doesn't mean it has to be a full 2.5in drive. Could easily do a "half size" or some random thing.
NVMe drives are tooo damn hot. I don't know how long they will run like that, I've been running SATA without any ventilation on my notebook machine and use MLC drive for games and it's fantastic. Reliable doesn't overheat or has BS driver things esp for Win7 or such.
I thank Samsung for at-least doing this, I hope they put out a damn MLC with 4TB as well and do an 8TB 870 EVO update. As for SATA it's a reliable technology and has numerous advantages over the stupid PCIe lane limit, bandwidth, heat, dependable TBW.
Because there's only so much space on a motherboard, and every m.2 drive takes up quite a bit of it.
SATA allows you to redistribute drives within the case.
Maybe once hard drives are gone, then a new form factor can come out, 1" SATA or something. But cases will still be made with HDD form factors until they disappear, so might as well stick to that standard.
But they should do something about IOPS, design a drive destined to be SATA, with a controller that can knock out the full 600MBps with any load pattern, dump three or four times as many channels on it as an m.2, and they'll fly off the shelves.
I have 2 sata WD Blue 1 tb ssds for game installs. They work totally fine and load games fast as hell. SATA ssds are still on point for large game storage space.
It takes 10 gig ethernet to exceed the speed of SATA - the SATA limit of 600 MBytes/sec is 4800Mbits/sec - allowing for TCP/IP overhead even a 5GbE link can not carry data as fast as a SATA link.
SATA is still the only effective way of increasing the internal storage of systems that have no free NVMe slots available.
Or a USB3 / USB-C drive taped / velcro’d somewhere in the PC case.
Could contain either 2.5” HDD, or 2.5” SDD or a m.2 NVME SSD in a USB enclosure. I’ve done that a couple of times with small cases. Works perfectly fine especially with solid state media.
Cable-attached storage still has the massive advantage that you can connect more drives than you have board area for. A regular motherboard may have one m.2 slot, paying out the nose may net you two slots. Selling off a few organs may buy a halo board with 3 or more slots. Or you may need a bloated riser card and occupy as 16x slot (no go for ITX). Or... you can use the at least 4 SATA ports on even the most bargain basement board (with 8 being hardly uncommon) to stuff more capacity in as needed with ease. SATA Express was the right idea at the wrong time: a x1 or x2 PCIe interface to allow NVMe, with PHY fallback to SATA, and at entirely acceptable bandwidth for most uses (stick in an m.2 boot drive for OS and key applications) would be a perfect upgrade path for consumer SATA use. If it integrated power transport too (for SSD only, block mechanical drives with keying at the device end cable) it would simplify cable routing too. But that boat has probably sailed for good, unless enterprise just happens to adopt such a connector and drive architecture, which seems unlikely with density demands ever increasing. I don't think we'll see any new internal high bandwidth cabling standards other than PCIe link rate updates to the persistently high-priced OCuLink.
For more internal storage, a USB3 / USB-C drive can be taped / velcro’d somewhere in the PC case.
Could contain either 2.5” HDD, or 2.5” SDD or a m.2 NVME SSD in a USB enclosure. I’ve done that a couple of times with small cases. Works perfectly fine especially with solid state media.
I remember experimenting with Compact Flash cards on PCMCIA and IDE adapters, trying to run Windows XP and Linux on them: Sure, there were no seeks, but at the time I didn’t understand the erase block issues yet and was just befuddled how some I/O just seemed so slow it had XP crash.
When FusionIO came out with their first devices, I jumped on those and they were basically a precursor of NVMe, ouch, is it 13 years already?
I’ve celebrated SATA SSDs, still have a 160GB Postville under current in a firewall, that may last another 10 years. I lost count, but there may be 30-50 SATA SSD in the house, some still used as „boot stick“ with only 128GB, most 1/4 to 1TB, some with 2TB.
The only 4TB SSD here is actually a RAID-0 using 4x1TB, because I tend to have plenty of SATA ports left over in all these tower chassis, that used to house 3.5“ HDDs. The last system with 2.4 TB FusionIO card also still sports 4x 200GB Intel enterprise DC3700 MLC drives, just because that X99 board has 10 SATA ports, so why not use them in a RAID so vastly overprovisioned that it will never die?
Like those ancient HDDs, these SSDs move around between boxes, almost like the „Winchesters“ or removable hard disks in the old days (been around since PDP-11/34). I use carrier-less hot swap bays on all systems, SATA caddies on laptops or USB3/SATA cases, for their flexibility: Milliseconds saved on storage benchmarks don’t compare to productivty and not having to disassemble a workstation with a 3 slot GPU and giant fans for low-noise, just to switch to another OS is a real bonus!
Most of the time SATA-SSD really is quite simply fast enough. If not, it’s the architecture, stupid!
And some of the more agonizing waits, turn out to be not at all related to SATA vs. NVMe…
ARK Survival Evolved is one of my favorite games, because I play that with my kids. Its main downside is loading-time: It just takes ages and ages to launch! Sure, it has 200GB data with all these extra maps and extensions, but perhaps more importantly, it’s 100.ooo files.
I got really tired of waiting for those minutes it took to load that from HDDs, so I invested in one of those „giant“ 1TB (SATA) SSDs at the time… still took awhile to load, but the improvement was significant (less than one CMU or coffee mug unit). Now, since we all play the game, I tried to be smart and put it on the network in the 4TB JBOD/RAID0 I mentioned, and then upgraded to a 10Gbit network to match the performance.
Alas, the load times across the 10Gbit network were horrific! Far worse, than the single 2TB HDD I had used in the beginning.
Then one day I ran ARK on Linux, within a larger experiment on the quality of Linux gaming. I didn’t have a big enough SSD around to store the game data, so instead I used one of those 2TB -WD HDD hunks from 15 years back, that just refuse to fail.
And then I almost fell of my chair, when ARK launched faster off that HDD than I had ever even see it launch from an NVMe drive (yes, of course, I had to have some of those, too).
Long story slightly abbreviated, the annoyingly slow ARK launches were never a storage issue, but a Windows file access overhead issue. Linux truly put Windows to shame that day! It managed to load those tens of thousands of files ARK required much faster from a HDD, than Windows needed on NVMe storage, and way, way, WAY faster than Windows (10Gbit) networking from a SATA-SSD RAID0.
Now, Windows and Windows 10Gbit networking isn’t always and by-default orders of magnitude slower than Linux. At least not, when you’re dealing with a few large files. But when your game (or application) happens to use 100.ooo small files instead of 10 big ones, be advised to test the OS before you blame it on the storage!
The general protocol and latency overhead of SATA vs. (PCIe)NVMe is no doubt significant. As are the benefits of a well established form factor with all those ports and enclosures I already own, and the flexibilty I learned to rely on. Dogma rarely helps and I find myself buying SATA-SSD over NVMe, once the default system boot storage requirements for every box have already been filled (with NVMe, if capable). Mostly because a) SATA SSD are really fast enough already (real bottlenecks are architecture) and b) because aggregating those lower capacity NVMe sticks into RAID0 to extend their usability, is really, really, really expensive, at least so far, because those PCIe switches are so overpriced by Avago/Broadcomm, while SATA multiplexers are cheap and mostly built-into the PCH you already own.
I don't mind SATA being limited since it is only huge file transfers are limited, not random performance or game/OS loading. The form factor needs improving though. A quick, cheap way to do that is to simply cut the 2.5" form factor to half or smaller since it will still leave a pair of mounting holes for screws.
It would be nice to see TLC based 16gb and 32gb SSDs..... look at all that empty space, its not like it is that much more work to do it and it will fit fine.
I suppose if you're set on buying a Samsung SATA drive, at least if they're all as bad as the 860 1TB QLC drive that has never been stable in a Zen system.
This will be a silly question no doubt, but is there no way to implement the NVMe protocol over SATA? Or is it not possible circuit-wise and electrically? (I understand that SATA is serial and NVMe is more parallel in nature.) If this could be done, while keeping a legacy mode for older drives, problem solved: the newer interface in the same port, while retaining backwards compatibility. Or would this idea be disastrous?
I really wanted to buy 6 8TB SSDs for my build. Instead I went with 2 PCIE NVME SSDS: 980 Pro 1TB boot drive, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB, 4 Sata SSDs in Raid 0 on the mobo, and 6 10TB Exos 3.5 drives in raid 10. I get around 1400MBps read on the Raid 10 and 450MBps write with my Highpoint 3720A HBA. It still is a pain to have to create proxy footage to the NVME drives.... I really really want to replace the HDDs with SSDs sooooo bad.
"Does the world need premium Sata SSDs?" Every single article, you read the same sentiment, formulated more ore less in the same manner. Do we need Sata ssds ? Yes, we need premium large sized sata ssds, as we have needed premium large size HDDs. Increasingly cheaper bulk storage, with the added benefit of EXTREMELY higher random throughput over HDDs, complying with infrastructures all over the world. What is the point of regurgitating the same cheap one- liner in every single article ? We have all been using NVME for years now, and yes we know its faster, and yes we know it is the future. But have the thermal challenges been solved ? And more interestingly, is the infrastructure around it changing fast enough for Sata to be discontinued ? If Sata was excluded from computer architecture as of now, could the world cope ? Nope. It is and has always been about price versus performace, and as long as we dont see the demise of HDDs I can't imagine why we would see the death of Sata SSDs. So to the original question: Does the world need premium Sata SSDs ? I think the question is wrong. What the industry is doing is trying to find ways to make cheaper nand that is also just as fast. Price versus performance. 870 Evo is not a premium SSD. It is the commercial sample of experimentation. One final question : Given that PREMIUM ssds will cost you an arm and a leg, would you rather your computer system was a hybrid of nvme/Sata SSD, for ultra fast, large and relatively cheap storage and application - Or would you say a few TBs of the insanely fast and expensive premium NVME at the same price, would solve all your problems ? The answer would be the same for most people in the world. Sorry about the rant but it was a long time coming..
interesting. Why the reviewer is disappointed when he found out Crucial MX changed 64 layer to 96 layer? Is 96 layer inferior to 64 layer NAND? Shouldn't that be considered an upgrade???
Hi anandtech , what is the s2fps05a01 chip. Is it a voltage sensor circuit, or power management ic. I don’t see this kind of chip on other ssds. Seems micron crucial has a chip like that. M.2 especially i can see no other seems to have a extra chip like that. Is it has anything to do with reduce Risk power outages?
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Marlin1975 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
So with high capacity SSD becoming more common and cheaper is there any movement to update the SATA standard to take advantage?Seems hard drive makers would be trying to get this to happen. Even a small performance boost would sell larger capacity SSDs.
ckmac - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Nope. Back in 2013-14, there was a new standard named "SATA Express", but it never gained any traction in the marketplace. That's why SSDs have moved to the M.2 form factor, with the PCIe interface. There's much more bandwidth:PCIe 3.0 x4 = 3.938 GB/s = 31.5 Gbps
PCIe 4.0 x4 = 7.877 GB/s = 63.0 Gbps
The same form factor can be used in laptops, desktops, consoles, etc. Newer motherboards have 2 to 3 total M.2 slots.
SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I have a SATA Express laptop! The complete lack of drives for the form factor aside from the one it shipped with (an OEM-specific Toshiba XG3 iirc) is somewhat annoying - but luckily there's an M.2 adapter available in a pinch.DanNeely - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Sata Express isn't even really an update of SATA. They just added the ability to run 2 PCIe lanes instead of a SATA link down the cable; effectively making it equivalent to a low end m.2 drive.Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The issue with the M.2 connector is that it wasn't designed for "Hot Swap"and the designed in Insertion life isn't high compared to the SATA style connector
- M.2 = ____ 50 Cycles
- SATA = 10,000 Cycles
Murloc - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
even hobby builders who upgrade their components often are likely to touch that maybe once every year at most. And the motherboard is unlikely to last more than 5 years if they're that upgrade-crazy.mr_tawan - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
well what about M.2 replace SD standard ? Maybe it can becomes pro-level video camera storage. Having 50 cycles of hot swap seems to be mis-opportunity.dotjaz - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
why would they need that? Why are you creating problem when it's not there?M.2 can't hotswap at all. It's physically too big. You'll need to completely redesign the physical and protocol layer. Why wouldn't you just use SD Express?
MetaCube - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link
WtfCaedenV - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I mean... with SATA drives/cables, then you need to unhook and reattach them all the time because the wires get in the way. m.2 is just on the mobo, so you don't need to ever mess with it unless the mobo is being replaced, or you are upgrading.Kamen Rider Blade - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
That's why I buy & use SATA BackPlanes =DCooperdale - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
My motherboard has SATA Express support. Not a SATA upgrade as much as a kind-of-hybrid between SATA and NVMe. But yes I see what you mean. It failed miserably though.Juraj_SK - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I think SATA is dead. Even with a newer version it's still a terrible interface for drives. Not only it doesn't provide power (so you need a separate cable from the PSU), but the drive itself needs a box and the whole thing takes a lot of space (often wasted inside - you could literally cut some SSD in half and it would still work :D).Whereas NVMe is chip only, super small, power included. No wasted cables or materials and it's connected with PCIe just like everything else.
eek2121 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
NVME is limited by surface area, so I wouldn’t count SATA as being dead yet. A SATA drive will always be able to hold more data than an NVME drive.DanNeely - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Except at the silly fringe that doesn't matter though. A sata drive packing more flash than can fit into an m.2 is going to be crazy expensive for a consumer model; and in the enterprise market taking several times longer than an m.2 drive to fill (think initial fill or raid rebuilds) is a major liability.eek2121 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
It isn’t a silly fringe thing. There are legitimate needs for bulk storage. One of my clients has a database that is 44TB in size.Guspaz - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Except for enterprise use there are already pcie-based connection standards for 2.5” drives. SATA isn’t needed for that.schujj07 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
If you have a 44TB DB that would be placed on a physical SAN typically. The only other possibility is the entire DB is a physical appliance. Either way the server will have multiple 2.5" drive bays. Depending on the age of the server, those slots will either be SATA/SAS, SATA/SAS/NVMe, or strictly NVMe. Either way both SAS and NVMe have drives larger than 15TB. Outside of one company (and that is a 3.5" SSD), the largest Enterprise grade SATA SSD are 7.68TB now. Sure you can purchase older ones on SATA that are larger, but with the rapid adoption of NVMe there isn't any reason to go SATA unless absolutely required. Also when it comes to cost, SATA Enterprise SSD isn't much cheaper than Enterprise NVMe, SAS is still overpriced though.CaedenV - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
"It isn't a silly fringe thing" and then proceeds to put forward an extremely fringe case.Just how many people have a 44TB DB laying around their house? This is consumer equipment. Don't put a 44TB DB on consumer equipment!
stancilmor - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
44TB? That is small potatoes. I’m dealing with storage requirements in double digits of PB annually. Certainly not consumer level when just drives cost in the millions.For home use I rely on the hot plug feature of SATA. For the hot plug feature I’ll be switching to USB C, USB 4 or thunderbolt 3 or 4. I still don’t have an M.2 Drive, but likely the next system upgrade will include an M.2 for the OS. SATA is getting to be too slow.
As for the Samsung drives. I recently upgraded an aging laptop’s mechanical drive with the EVO 870 simply, because the 860 had too long of a shipping time.
I also almost exclusively use Samsung drives in upgrades, because of how well the Samsung data migration tool works. I have tried Acronis and use clonezilla, both have created unusable clones on occasion. Samsung’s Data Migration just works, even on a running system.
Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
They won't be using SATA - and it will be spread across a whole lot more than one single drive.dotjaz - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
But they are using SATA, nobody said it's single drive. It's how much storage you can fit into a 1U rack that matters, SATA is the only choice at the moment.schujj07 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
That is 100% false. NVMe is only surface area limited in the M.2 form factor. However, 99% of users do not need more than a 4TB NVMe SSD. Those that need larger drives can use M.2 > U.2 converters and get much larger SSDs.Beaver M. - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Yeah well, look into most SATA SSDs, their PCB isnt bigger than that of a M.2 SSD. Plus M.3 is coming = more space.Also theres U.2, which pretty much allows to use 2.5"-sized SSDs to be used (even on a M.2 connector).
SATA is dead. And they know it, else they would have released a new standard very long ago.
nevcairiel - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The solution to that is called U.2, NVMe with a cable.flgt - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
^^^CaedenV - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
not really? You are typically limited to 8 or 16 chips with most SSDs, and you can hold that on a long double-sided m.2 just fine. If you are going with more than that then you are looking something extremely custom with a built in raid of some sort and that is going to be stupidly expensive and not for the consumer market.Just look at the pic of that 4TB board. Maybe 4 storage modules in it assuming there are 2 more on the other side? You can easily fit that on m.2 with room to spare.
flyingpants265 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Storage in general is kinda dead. People buy 2tb drives very reluctantly if they want to add space.DanNeely - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA as an SSD interface is going nowhere. SATA as an HDD interface probably has 5-10 years left before the price crossover finally kills spinning rust off.If at some point in the future we do see a new SATA spec; it'll be because mass market spinning rust for NASes has gotten fast enough to bottleneck: In which case they'll backport the faster transport parts of the 2x as fast SAS standard to make SATA4.
wicketr - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA at this point is need of major changes to keep up. They can't do a minor refresh at this point. With that in mind, I hope they change the cable so that it incorporates power into it as well. And they've got to shoot for something like 50Gb/s.At this point the latest USB spec is faster and provides power in a similar sized port. SATA should be able to beat that and it's a shame they haven't done so yet.
Wereweeb - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
They made a major update. No one cares about SATA Express. That you don't even know about it only goes to show that no one cares, there's no need or use for it.SATA is plenty enough for Hard Drives, and SSD's are going to keep using M.2, U.3, and other PCIe ports. There's no need for a port that isn't going to be used by anyone.
If anything, they could theoretically run spinning rust off an x1 PCIe 3.0 (Or even 2.0) connector, but that's also not really needed.
If you want consumer motherboards to have U.3 connectors, then say that. And I'd agree. I never like bare PCB's where they're not necessary.
Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I ABSOLUTELY want U.2 connectors on motherboards, and U.2 drives priced for mass-market sales.It won't happen, because the manufacturers want a hard line drawn between home-use and business-use hardware so they can price-gouge for business hardware. Mass-market U.2 drives would ruin their pricing strategy.
Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
They don't really need to, consumer SSD's are already shit for most enterprise applications, and will be plain garbage when it's all just QLC.Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Consumer U.2 drives wouldn't ruin the enterprise SSD market, because the form factor is a much less important difference than the fact that consumer SSDs have SLC caching and enterprise SSDs don't.Consumer U.2 drives would fail because the market is simply too small. The number of consumers who can actually afford and want 3+ NVMe SSDs in their desktop (and aren't already on a HEDT system) is too small to justify bringing a new category of products to market.
Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Changing the SATA standard in a way that wrecks backwards compatibility would be pointless - U.2 is already an alternative standard that does that.It's dead. It's a silly way to access flash devices.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Or they'd just switch to using SAS in those devices.flyingpants265 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
The suggestion for hard drives was to double the amount of heads/platters per drive to get costs down even further, I think this decreases reliability too but reduces overhead costs for datacenters because it's fewer drives.8 tb, 10 TB and 12 TB drives are more expensive per gb than the two terabyte drives.... Prices haven't gone down since 2010. I should be able to walk in and get a 8tb drive for $89. The markets really crapped out.
Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
HDD prices never really recovered after the 2011 floods in Thailand. By the time the impact was over, SSDs were eating their lunch, and the incentive to keep dropping prices went away forever.Jorgp2 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SAS connectors provide power and up to 4x PCI-E lanes.Kevin G - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
At the time SATA was developed, it made sense. Times of course have changed with SATA now feeling more of a legacy technology. It'll continue to hang around as the protocols it was built upon (AHCI etc.) are present in legacy OS where as NVMe support may not be there. Similarly there is no support for removable media though leveraging USB for that now is trivial. Main barrier for the formal death of SATA is still cost as NVMe still carries a slight premium over SATA and consumer systems have limited PCIe connectivity.Glaurung - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The main barrier for the formal death of SATA are hundreds of millions of perfectly usable older systems that don't support NVME or have limited NVME slots.Qasar - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
" Main barrier for the formal death of SATA is still cost as NVMe still carries a slight premium over SATA and consumer systems have limited PCIe connectivity. "i think you might be also forgetting the aspect of the space requirements of the nvme connector as well.
Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I've always thought SATA was a mistake.Removing the ability to chain multiple drives made for an ugly cabling situation, and the connectors are flimsy as hell. The new power connector in particular served no purpose whatsoever aside from annoyance.
If it had used more robust connectors and allowed chaining drives, it would've been fantastic. But that would've been to much like the right decision for them to entertain it.
Glaurung - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA on the desktop and in NAS boxes is still very much alive, TYVM.Sata SSDs will continue to be made and sold as long as there are older computers in use that have a SATA bay in them. My main computer only has 1 NVME slot, but it also has a SATA bay. WIthout that SATA bay I'd have to have all my files crammed onto on a single SSD.
Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The technology to update SATA is there, it just takes a bit of will power from the SATA group to borrow the SAS speeds and bring it to the consumers.The SATA connector is far better suited for "Hot Swap" and M.2 was never designed for "Hot Swap" capabilities.
powerarmour - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
No, we'll require SATA for bulk storage for a good few years yet.How many M.2 only NAS systems are there?
CaedenV - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA is still perfectly fine for old spinning rust drives. Sure the burst performance could be better with a faster connection... but how often is that needed? For sustained data transfers SATA3 is still faster than any spinning drives on the market that cap out at 150-200MBps on a good day.watzupken - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I don't think SATA is going to go away anytime soon. While it is not as fast as a good NVME SSD, it makes up for it by offering a good price to capacity ratio. It just like why mechanical drive still exists today. Most NVME SSDs are affordable up to around 1TB, and at higher capacity, the prices goes up significantly. Also one is usually limited to 2 or 3 NVME slots due to limitation of number of PCI-E lanes. Thus, having the SATA ports to supplement additional storage is unlikely to go away, at least from a desktop perspective.sonny73n - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
"..,Most NVME SSDs are affordable up to around 1TB, and at higher capacity, the prices goes up significantly."Please stop spouting BS.
ADATA SX8200 Pro 2TB M.2 $239
Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SATA $249
Both is on Amazon right now.
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
2TB on black Friday for an ADATA over a year ago. $250 isn't impressive.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
2TB for $200 I meant.Shlong - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
SATA is necessary if you need multiple drives. I only have two M.2 slots on my motherboard but numerous SATA ports. I have a 512GB boot drive and 1TB data drive in both slots. I need more storage so I have a couple 2TB SATA SSD's connected.ET - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
You're confusing SATA with the disk form factor. There are SATA M.2 drive, SATA 2.5" drives and SATA 3.5" drives. SATA M.2 drives get their power from the same connector, by the way.The box size has little to do with the interface, more to do with case compatibility. Cases which are built to house multiple drives have spaces set up for them. That's a standard and both cases and drives are designed for it. The drive could theoretically be designed to be smaller (and there were 1.8" drives in the past).
TelstarTOS - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
More common? Yes.Cheaper? Hell no. Still over 10c/GB
Kurosaki - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
A shame the 3 TB version is 379 USD to expensive. This will never work unless price per GB falls to a quarter of today's, and reliability data retention wise gets at least on par with the spinners. 479 for 4TB is just ridiculous.ksec - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA SSD are not intended for Speed though. They are aiming at large storage HDD replacement. Give me a QLC SATA 8TB for $399 and I will still buy it.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
With 8TB it might not be quite so horrible.flyingpants265 - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
SSDs can do 3000mb/s or a lot more with parallelization and raid, you could probably get 30,000mb/s or some insane number like that, eventually with a single SSD.It's a little weird that we don't have better cables.
Great_Scott - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
It's interesting to see the SATA market deteriorate.I don't understand how most PCs can get away with two or one physical drive slots, but assuming that remains the trend, I wonder what NAS owners are going to do once SSDs are cheap and large enough to use for RAID but there aren't any products to use for it...
mooninite - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Why should rotating rust drives still be shipped with 512e sectors?It must be the same marketing data these manufacturers are using to show they still need to make SATA SSDs.
PixyMisa - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Time to start replacing SATA with USB-C.eek2121 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
In the past I have advocated for internal USB-C because it would be a perfect replacement for SATA.futrtrubl - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Way back when there was even an HDD that was natively usb, the Samsung Spinpoint N3UJorgp2 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Lol.It's slower than SATA
Krimzon - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
How is 40gbps slower than 6?futrtrubl - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Hell, USB 3.1 (SuperSpeed+/3.2 gen2x1/3.2 gen1x2) is faster than SATABeaver M. - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I think USB latency is much higher. Not sure, though.Glaurung - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
IIRC, USB is one channel one way at a time, which makes it less responsive than SATA (which is bidirectional), even though USB has higher bandwidth on paper.quorm - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Yeah, usb is no good with small files.Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
UASP put paid to that old downside.Krimzon - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Early USB standards were uni directional. 3 and 4 are full duplex.PixyMisa - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
10Gbps USB is already twice as fast as 6Gbps SATA because it uses more efficient encoding. 20Gbps USB is available right now, and 40Gbps is part of the USB 4 spec though I don't know how widespread support for it is.Wereweeb - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
No need to replace SATA, it will die by itself. What we need is high-end consumer motherboards to get U.3.Billy Tallis - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
U.3 is probably only going to be around for two or three product cycles. It's very much a stopgap solution to unify U.2 and SAS, both of which are already on the way out in favor of EDSFF.Wereweeb - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Great! Then they can introduce it for consumers to have 2.5" drives again.Leeea - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The nice thing about SATA SSDs is they tend to just work. Pull one out of one system, stick them in another, and it can boot.The pci drives seem to be a lot more fussy with that.
danbob999 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Not really. All drives (IDE / SATA / NVMe / USB / Whatever) pretty much just work. The problem is the OS may not boot. When switching to a different protocol (say SATA to NVMe), you increase chances it won't boot.Linux is easier to get to boot than Windows when changing the drive to a different system.
Jorgp2 - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Nah, it all comes down to EFI vs MBR.MBR systems just look for a boot partition and boot it, EFI actually stores the location on the motherboard flash.
WaltC - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Agreed...;) I might say "UEFI vs. Legacy," though. And much of it has to do with the knowledge, experience, and skill of the computer operator...! No question about that. (It's actually MBR vs. GPT--GPT is better. All of my SATA HDDs are formatted GPT, etc. I have no MBR-formatted drives.)The list of NVMe drives here is curious. Where is the 980 Pro from Samsung?--been selling for a while now--one of several PCIe4 NVMe drives available. Makes me question when this article was actually written....? It seems incomplete or out of date. Samsung is a chip company no longer in the business of making platter drives (last I looked, anyway-do they still sell the Spinpoints?), so it's natural for them to sell SSDs of varying types, sizes, and prices, imo.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I deliberately chose not to include 980 PRO results in the graphs for this review, because that's a silly comparison to make against a SATA drive. But if you really care, you can use Bench: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2724?vs=27...Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
A half-decent UEFI implementation will enumerate the bootloaders (or fall back to the default /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi path) if the drive isn't configured in the motherboard.Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Unfortunately, "half-decent" can't be taken for granted. The ASRock motherboard in the new SSD testbed won't look in the standard path for a bootloader, but it will happily boot any Windows bootloader it finds.Duncan Macdonald - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA may be declining but is far from dead - many motherboards (and laptops) only have one NVMe slot - adding a SATA drive is far easier than replacing the NVMe drive when it is the system drive. Also NVMe drives bigger than 4TB are rare and expensive so anyone needing large storage capacity (over 4TB) has a choice between SATA or expensive NVMe.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Some motherboard brands also don't know how to design a motherboard properly, like Gigabyte.Drives like the Inland Performance Plus (Phison) don't fit in boards like the Z390 UD.
Tomatotech - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
These SATA circuit board PCBs are really tiny. I’ve sometimes wondered about removing the PCB from the drive and just plugging it direct into the motherboard SATA socket, no cable or drive case needed. This wouldn’t work out of the box as I think the motherboard port and the drive’s port are both the same gender.So this would need 1) a small gender changer intermediary, and 2) a way to get the power cable in there as well. Depending on the orientation of the motherboard SATA port, there might be space next to it for the power cable.
Tomatotech - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The advantages would be fewer cables and less space taken in small cases.Tomatotech - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
If SATA drive manufacturers added a secondary power port at the top of the PCB (which they won’t do) and included a small cheap gender changer for the data port, this could become a feasible life extender for using SATA in small or crowded cases.Qasar - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
" I’ve sometimes wondered about removing the PCB from the drive and just plugging it direct into the motherboard SATA socket,"is that what nvme physically is ? :-)
Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
No, NVMe is a protocol. You're thinking of M.2, which doesn't have to use NVMe. There are actually many M.2 drives that use the SATA protocol.Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
You've basically just described M.2 SATA mode.Lord of the Bored - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Funnily enough, that exists as a product already. Search for "disk on module".While more commonly known for the older IDE interface, SATA versions do exist.
You could, of course, recreate it with an off-the-shelf SATA drive, a screwdriver, and a light touch of solder.
Beaver M. - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Cant wait for a 980 EVO, because the price for this 4 TB one is pretty good, which will probably not be much different on an M.2 version.And even if, comparable M.2 drives with only 2 TB cost around $400.
sonny73n - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Stop lying. 2TB ADATA SX8200 Pro M.2 currently on Amazon is $10 cheaper than this slow and outdated SATA SSD.Qasar - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
maybe he is comparing samsung to samsung ? if thats the case, there is a pretty big price difference between the same capacity.Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
So much wasted space in the 2.5" HDD housingI really wish they would bring back 1.8" HDD form factor
The 1.8" was barely larger than a old PS1/2 memory card.
Tomatotech - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
They did. It’s called m.2 now.Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
m.2 sticks aren't in a format where you can just slide it in your pocket and go.You need to install it into a external housing.
Traditional M.2 is designed to be installed into your MoBo and left there.
SATA plugs were designed for Hot Plug while M.2 was never designed for that purpose.
It was install and leave it there.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Use a USB stick then.Kamen Rider Blade - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Some folks want faster speeds & larger drives, a USB stick isn't going to cut it for some folkssonny73n - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I guess you don't know how to use file sharing features in the OS over gigabit Ethernet or WiFi. You're the only one that still find hot plug useful. Please don't comment for the rest of us.Billy Tallis - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I still occasionally use SATA SSDs as if they were floppies, since all of my desktops have hot-swap bays. But its becoming more common that I use M.2 NVMe SSDs in USB enclosures. Either solution is preferable to WiFi or gigE when transferring tens of GB or more.Kamen Rider Blade - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Not every machine is going to be connected locally on your own network.Not every machine will even be online either.
Please don't comment for the rest of us.
Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
M.2 in a USB 3.2 / Thunderbolt caddySorted
CaptainChaos - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
How many grannies or grandpas need more than what SATA offers in the machines they use to go online for email, Facebook, or Amazon? Even if they stream videos their systems are ok using hardware a couple steps behind state of the art! SATA will linger for several more years.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
640K ought to be enough for anyone.lmcd - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
The thing that gets me is that just because a drive is U.2 doesn't mean it has to be a full 2.5in drive. Could easily do a "half size" or some random thing.Silver5urfer - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Yes the world needs a SATA SSD lol.NVMe drives are tooo damn hot. I don't know how long they will run like that, I've been running SATA without any ventilation on my notebook machine and use MLC drive for games and it's fantastic. Reliable doesn't overheat or has BS driver things esp for Win7 or such.
I thank Samsung for at-least doing this, I hope they put out a damn MLC with 4TB as well and do an 8TB 870 EVO update. As for SATA it's a reliable technology and has numerous advantages over the stupid PCIe lane limit, bandwidth, heat, dependable TBW.
lmcd - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
There's a reason people are going wild over the SK Hynix P31. It's exactly what you need.Danvelopment - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
SATA drives totally still make sense.Why?
Because there's only so much space on a motherboard, and every m.2 drive takes up quite a bit of it.
SATA allows you to redistribute drives within the case.
Maybe once hard drives are gone, then a new form factor can come out, 1" SATA or something. But cases will still be made with HDD form factors until they disappear, so might as well stick to that standard.
But they should do something about IOPS, design a drive destined to be SATA, with a controller that can knock out the full 600MBps with any load pattern, dump three or four times as many channels on it as an m.2, and they'll fly off the shelves.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Then you should be using U.2 instead of M.2.hansmuff - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
Especially the 4TB seems like a fantastic Games drive to me, really good performance at a great price.ekon - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
What (my) world needs is an absolutely rubbish but cheap high capacity SSD. As many cell levels as it takes.jarablue - Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - link
I have 2 sata WD Blue 1 tb ssds for game installs. They work totally fine and load games fast as hell. SATA ssds are still on point for large game storage space.Spunjji - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
It'll be interesting to see if this changes along with software being developed for the new generation of consoles.Duncan Macdonald - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
It takes 10 gig ethernet to exceed the speed of SATA - the SATA limit of 600 MBytes/sec is 4800Mbits/sec - allowing for TCP/IP overhead even a 5GbE link can not carry data as fast as a SATA link.SATA is still the only effective way of increasing the internal storage of systems that have no free NVMe slots available.
Tomatotech - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Or a USB3 / USB-C drive taped / velcro’d somewhere in the PC case.Could contain either 2.5” HDD, or 2.5” SDD or a m.2 NVME SSD in a USB enclosure. I’ve done that a couple of times with small cases. Works perfectly fine especially with solid state media.
edzieba - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
Cable-attached storage still has the massive advantage that you can connect more drives than you have board area for. A regular motherboard may have one m.2 slot, paying out the nose may net you two slots. Selling off a few organs may buy a halo board with 3 or more slots. Or you may need a bloated riser card and occupy as 16x slot (no go for ITX). Or... you can use the at least 4 SATA ports on even the most bargain basement board (with 8 being hardly uncommon) to stuff more capacity in as needed with ease.SATA Express was the right idea at the wrong time: a x1 or x2 PCIe interface to allow NVMe, with PHY fallback to SATA, and at entirely acceptable bandwidth for most uses (stick in an m.2 boot drive for OS and key applications) would be a perfect upgrade path for consumer SATA use. If it integrated power transport too (for SSD only, block mechanical drives with keying at the device end cable) it would simplify cable routing too. But that boat has probably sailed for good, unless enterprise just happens to adopt such a connector and drive architecture, which seems unlikely with density demands ever increasing. I don't think we'll see any new internal high bandwidth cabling standards other than PCIe link rate updates to the persistently high-priced OCuLink.
Tomatotech - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
For more internal storage, a USB3 / USB-C drive can be taped / velcro’d somewhere in the PC case.Could contain either 2.5” HDD, or 2.5” SDD or a m.2 NVME SSD in a USB enclosure. I’ve done that a couple of times with small cases. Works perfectly fine especially with solid state media.
abufrejoval - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I remember experimenting with Compact Flash cards on PCMCIA and IDE adapters, trying to run Windows XP and Linux on them: Sure, there were no seeks, but at the time I didn’t understand the erase block issues yet and was just befuddled how some I/O just seemed so slow it had XP crash.When FusionIO came out with their first devices, I jumped on those and they were basically a precursor of NVMe, ouch, is it 13 years already?
I’ve celebrated SATA SSDs, still have a 160GB Postville under current in a firewall, that may last another 10 years. I lost count, but there may be 30-50 SATA SSD in the house, some still used as „boot stick“ with only 128GB, most 1/4 to 1TB, some with 2TB.
The only 4TB SSD here is actually a RAID-0 using 4x1TB, because I tend to have plenty of SATA ports left over in all these tower chassis, that used to house 3.5“ HDDs. The last system with 2.4 TB FusionIO card also still sports 4x 200GB Intel enterprise DC3700 MLC drives, just because that X99 board has 10 SATA ports, so why not use them in a RAID so vastly overprovisioned that it will never die?
Like those ancient HDDs, these SSDs move around between boxes, almost like the „Winchesters“ or removable hard disks in the old days (been around since PDP-11/34). I use carrier-less hot swap bays on all systems, SATA caddies on laptops or USB3/SATA cases, for their flexibility: Milliseconds saved on storage benchmarks don’t compare to productivty and not having to disassemble a workstation with a 3 slot GPU and giant fans for low-noise, just to switch to another OS is a real bonus!
Most of the time SATA-SSD really is quite simply fast enough. If not, it’s the architecture, stupid!
And some of the more agonizing waits, turn out to be not at all related to SATA vs. NVMe…
ARK Survival Evolved is one of my favorite games, because I play that with my kids. Its main downside is loading-time: It just takes ages and ages to launch! Sure, it has 200GB data with all these extra maps and extensions, but perhaps more importantly, it’s 100.ooo files.
I got really tired of waiting for those minutes it took to load that from HDDs, so I invested in one of those „giant“ 1TB (SATA) SSDs at the time… still took awhile to load, but the improvement was significant (less than one CMU or coffee mug unit). Now, since we all play the game, I tried to be smart and put it on the network in the 4TB JBOD/RAID0 I mentioned, and then upgraded to a 10Gbit network to match the performance.
Alas, the load times across the 10Gbit network were horrific! Far worse, than the single 2TB HDD I had used in the beginning.
Then one day I ran ARK on Linux, within a larger experiment on the quality of Linux gaming. I didn’t have a big enough SSD around to store the game data, so instead I used one of those 2TB -WD HDD hunks from 15 years back, that just refuse to fail.
And then I almost fell of my chair, when ARK launched faster off that HDD than I had ever even see it launch from an NVMe drive (yes, of course, I had to have some of those, too).
Long story slightly abbreviated, the annoyingly slow ARK launches were never a storage issue, but a Windows file access overhead issue. Linux truly put Windows to shame that day! It managed to load those tens of thousands of files ARK required much faster from a HDD, than Windows needed on NVMe storage, and way, way, WAY faster than Windows (10Gbit) networking from a SATA-SSD RAID0.
Now, Windows and Windows 10Gbit networking isn’t always and by-default orders of magnitude slower than Linux. At least not, when you’re dealing with a few large files. But when your game (or application) happens to use 100.ooo small files instead of 10 big ones, be advised to test the OS before you blame it on the storage!
The general protocol and latency overhead of SATA vs. (PCIe)NVMe is no doubt significant.
As are the benefits of a well established form factor with all those ports and enclosures I already own, and the flexibilty I learned to rely on. Dogma rarely helps and I find myself buying SATA-SSD over NVMe, once the default system boot storage requirements for every box have already been filled (with NVMe, if capable). Mostly because a) SATA SSD are really fast enough already (real bottlenecks are architecture) and b) because aggregating those lower capacity NVMe sticks into RAID0 to extend their usability, is really, really, really expensive, at least so far, because those PCIe switches are so overpriced by Avago/Broadcomm, while SATA multiplexers are cheap and mostly built-into the PCH you already own.
zodiacfml - Thursday, February 18, 2021 - link
I don't mind SATA being limited since it is only huge file transfers are limited, not random performance or game/OS loading. The form factor needs improving though. A quick, cheap way to do that is to simply cut the 2.5" form factor to half or smaller since it will still leave a pair of mounting holes for screws.Snowleopard3000 - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
It would be nice to see TLC based 16gb and 32gb SSDs..... look at all that empty space, its not like it is that much more work to do it and it will fit fine.Snowleopard3000 - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
TB not GBMDD1963 - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
With my slightly less than 10 TBW typical usage per year based on my 960 EVO, the 4 TB 870 EVO should last me...240 years? :)Oxford Guy - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
I suppose if you're set on buying a Samsung SATA drive, at least if they're all as bad as the 860 1TB QLC drive that has never been stable in a Zen system.toke - Saturday, February 20, 2021 - link
Isn't SK hynix Gold S31 far better in all graps by a big margin?GeoffreyA - Sunday, February 21, 2021 - link
This will be a silly question no doubt, but is there no way to implement the NVMe protocol over SATA? Or is it not possible circuit-wise and electrically? (I understand that SATA is serial and NVMe is more parallel in nature.) If this could be done, while keeping a legacy mode for older drives, problem solved: the newer interface in the same port, while retaining backwards compatibility. Or would this idea be disastrous?R3Z3N - Friday, February 26, 2021 - link
I really wanted to buy 6 8TB SSDs for my build. Instead I went with 2 PCIE NVME SSDS: 980 Pro 1TB boot drive, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB, 4 Sata SSDs in Raid 0 on the mobo, and 6 10TB Exos 3.5 drives in raid 10. I get around 1400MBps read on the Raid 10 and 450MBps write with my Highpoint 3720A HBA. It still is a pain to have to create proxy footage to the NVME drives.... I really really want to replace the HDDs with SSDs sooooo bad.Henry 3 Dogg - Friday, July 9, 2021 - link
"...and power efficiency cannot make big leaps without getting rid of the SATA performance limits."OK, I may be being thick. But that just doesn't seem rational at all.
PushT - Monday, October 18, 2021 - link
"Does the world need premium Sata SSDs?" Every single article, you read the same sentiment, formulated more ore less in the same manner. Do we need Sata ssds ? Yes, we need premium large sized sata ssds, as we have needed premium large size HDDs. Increasingly cheaper bulk storage, with the added benefit of EXTREMELY higher random throughput over HDDs, complying with infrastructures all over the world. What is the point of regurgitating the same cheap one- liner in every single article ?We have all been using NVME for years now, and yes we know its faster, and yes we know it is the future. But have the thermal challenges been solved ? And more interestingly, is the infrastructure around it changing fast enough for Sata to be discontinued ? If Sata was excluded from computer architecture as of now, could the world cope ? Nope. It is and has always been about price versus performace, and as long as we dont see the demise of HDDs I can't imagine why we would see the death of Sata SSDs.
So to the original question: Does the world need premium Sata SSDs ? I think the question is wrong. What the industry is doing is trying to find ways to make cheaper nand that is also just as fast. Price versus performance. 870 Evo is not a premium SSD. It is the commercial sample of experimentation. One final question : Given that PREMIUM ssds will cost you an arm and a leg, would you rather your computer system was a hybrid of nvme/Sata SSD, for ultra fast, large and relatively cheap storage and application - Or would you say a few TBs of the insanely fast and expensive premium NVME at the same price, would solve all your problems ? The answer would be the same for most people in the world. Sorry about the rant but it was a long time coming..
pentaxmx - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
interesting. Why the reviewer is disappointed when he found out Crucial MX changed 64 layer to 96 layer? Is 96 layer inferior to 64 layer NAND? Shouldn't that be considered an upgrade???yifu - Thursday, October 27, 2022 - link
Hi anandtech , what is the s2fps05a01 chip. Is it a voltage sensor circuit, or power management ic. I don’t see this kind of chip on other ssds. Seems micron crucial has a chip like that. M.2 especially i can see no other seems to have a extra chip like that. Is it has anything to do with reduce Risk power outages?Ryan Smith - Friday, October 28, 2022 - link
Per a quick check, that would appear to be a PMIC.These aren't typically needed for SSDs. But I don't know quite enough that I'm comfortable in speculating why it's there.