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Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

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Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#101

Post by tracker1 »

gotodengo wrote: post #35
crote wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, what's the market for them? If you care even remotely about speed, you'll get an NVMe drive. If you're a data hoarder who wants to connect 50 drives, you'll go for spinning rust. Enterprise will go for U.3. So what's left? An upgrade for grandma's 15-year-old desktop? A borderline-scammy pre-built machine where the listed spec is "1TB SSD" and they used the absolute cheapest drive they can find? Maybe a…

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

Did that for a while until I invested in a NAS... at that point those early SSDs became drives for my RPi projects, which worked well enough until I gave all my RPi hardware away earlier this year... those 12+yo SSD drives still running without issue.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#102

Post by tracker1 »

cheema33 wrote: post #26
Flavius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will be down-voted to hell for this comment, but luckily their down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...

> down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though... People like you and I pay tariffs. Not China. You realize that right? And how will that stop China? Tariffs mostly hurt American consumers and producers. Just ask farmers.

First, cost != price. Pricing is in part based on competitive product availability. So if the cost of a product + tariff is greater than the cost of a competing product, there is pressure to reduce that cost. There's also pressure to produce elsewhere, such as domestically to avoid the tariff altogether.

This is a large part of why the tariffs have in fact not had the dramatic impact on all pricing that some have suggested would happen. It's been largely a negotiation tactic first, and second, many products have plenty of margin and competition to allow for pricing to remain relatively level even in the face of tariffs... so it absolutely can, in fact be a burden borne by Chinese manufacturers by lowering margins instead of US importers simply eating the cost of tariffs.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#103

Post by tracker1 »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #12

If Samsung (maybe) ends SSD production and Crucial existing the consumer business, what is the next best alternative for SSD products? I thought Samsung was the de facto choice for high-quality SSD products.

there are more non-crucial suppliers of Micron based ram than Crucial... they can pick up the slack... Micron simply wanted to redirect resources to supporting larger contracts to other suppliers over direct consumer support. The market isn't shrinking as a result.

I would suspect the same with Samsung exiting SATA (not NVME) drives... their chips are likely to be used by other MFGs, but even then maybe not as SATA is much slower than what most solid state memory and controllers are capable of supporting. There's also a massive low-end market of competition for SATA SSDs and Samsung sales are likely not the best overall.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#105

Post by pdimitar »

saltcured wrote: post #91
0manrho wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SATA just needs to be retired. It's already been replaced, we don't need Yet Another Storage Interface. Considering consumer IO-Chipsets are already implemented in such a way that they take 4 (or generally, a few) upstream lanes of $CurrentGenPCIe to the CPU, and bifurcating/multiplexing it out (providing USB, SATA, NVMe, etc I/O), we should just remove the SATA cost/manufacturing overhead entirely, and focusing on k…

I think it's becoming reasonable to think consumer storage could be a limited number of soldered NVMe and NVMe-over-M.2 slots, complemented by contemporary USB for more expansion. That USB expansion might be some kind of JBOD chassis, whether that is a pile of SATA or additional M.2 drives. The main problem is having proper translation of device management features, e.g. SMART diagnostics or similar getting back to t…

As @wtallis already said, a lot of external USB stuff is just unreliable.

Right now I am overlooking my display and seeing 4 different USB-A hubs and 3 different enclosures that I am not sure what to do with (likely can't even sell them, they'd go for like 10-20 EUR and deliveries go for 5 EUR so why bother; I'll likely just dump them at one point). _All_ of them were marketed as 24/7, not needing cooling etc. _All_ of them could not last two hours of constant hammering and it was not even a load at 100% of the bus; more like 60-70%. All began disappearing and reappearing every few minutes (I am presuming after overheating subsided).

Additionally, for my future workstation at least I want everything inside. If I get an [e]ATX motherboard and the PC case for it then it would feel like a half-solution if I then have to stack a few drives or NAS-like enclosures at the side. And yeah I don't have a huge villa. Desk space can become a problem and I don't have cabinets or closets / storerooms either.

SATA SSDs fill a very valid niche to this day: quieter and less power-hungry and smaller NAS-like machines. Sure, not mainstream, I get how giants like Samsung think, but to claim they are no longer desirable tech like many in this thread do is a bit misinformed.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#106

Post by pdimitar »

pjdesno wrote: post #52

The storage markets I can think of, off the top of my head: 1. individual computers 2. hobbyist NAS, which may cross over at the high end into the pro audio/video market 3. cloud 4. enterprise #1 is all NVMe. It's dominated by laptops, and desktops (which are still 30% or so of shipments) are probably at the high end of the performance range. #2 isn't a big market, and takes what they can get. Like #3, most of them c…

I agree hobbyist NAS is niche but it's very useful: less noise, less electricity bills, and not that much less space i.e. if you can find 3x Samsung 870 QVO drives at 8TB, you can have a super solid 16TB NAS with redundancy (or 24TB without). Not to mention compact; you can have an ITX-sized PC do quite a lot of work.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#107

Post by kasabali »

Marsymars wrote: post #61
vachina wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SATA SSD has a huge heatsink attached to it. It is crucial for 24/7 use. NVME needs active cooling to survive.

Are any SATA SSDs actually built to sink heat into the enclosure? e.g. The 860 Pro released in 2018 has a PCB taking up a third of plastic enclosure with no heatsinks to speak of: https://www.myfixguide.com/samsung-860-pro-ssd-teardown/ And even in worst-case hammering of drives, thermally throttled NVMEs can still sustain higher speeds than SATA drives.

It isn't plastic, though, it's aluminum.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#108

Post by kasabali »

pjdesno wrote: post #74
foxrider wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SATA SSDs have one advantage though - their size. You don't see m.2 form factor SSDs going well over 8TBs, but for a larger SATA drive you can find >8TBs easily. Samsung had the best offering for this recently - Samsung SSD 870 QVO The enterprise world has U2, but us plebs don't really have a comparable alternative.

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

Problem here is I haven't seen SAS connectors in any consumer motherboard.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#109

Post by kasabali »

vachina wrote: post #44
zb3 wrote: post #4

Fsck this cartel.. I hope China will fill these gaps and help restore normal prices.

China has also wisened up and is limiting supplies also. Their B2C marketplace is seeing less and less >1TB SSDs and even those who sell I've seen prices x2 in the span of two months.

They aren't limiting supplies, they can't scale up the production: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/chinas-chip...

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#110

Post by pjdesno »

kasabali wrote: post #108
pjdesno wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Problem here is I haven't seen SAS connectors in any consumer motherboard.

Yeah, you need an adapter. Search on eBay for "freeNAS" and "LSI" and you'll find a bunch listed for way under $100.
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