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Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

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Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#111

Post by saltcured »

pdimitar wrote: post #105
saltcured wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_…

I recognize the value in some kind of internal expansion once you are talking about an ATX or even uATX board and a desktop chassis. I just wonder if the USB protocol can be hardened for this using some appropriate internal cabling. Is it an intrinsic problem with the controllers and protocol, or more related to the cheap external parts aimed at consumers?

Once you get to uATX and larger, this could potentially be via a PCIe adapter card too, right? For an SSD scenario, I think some multiplexer card full of NVMe M.2 slots makes more sense than trying to stick to an HDD array physical form factor. I think this would effectively be a PCIe switch?

I've used LSI MegaRAID cards in the past to add a bunch of ports to a PC. I combined this with a 5-in-3 disk subsystem in a desktop PC. This is where the old 3x 5.25" drive bay space could be occupied by one subsystem with 5x 3.5" HDD hot-swap trays. I even found out how to re-flash such a card to convert it from RAID to a basic SATA/SAS expander for JBOD service, since I wanted to use OS-based software RAID concepts instead.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#112

Post by pdimitar »

saltcured wrote: post #111
pdimitar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_…

I recognize the value in some kind of internal expansion once you are talking about an ATX or even uATX board and a desktop chassis. I just wonder if the USB protocol can be hardened for this using some appropriate internal cabling. Is it an intrinsic problem with the controllers and protocol, or more related to the cheap external parts aimed at consumers? Once you get to uATX and larger, this could potentially be vi…

> I just wonder if the USB protocol can be hardened for this using some appropriate internal cabling

Honestly no idea. Should be doable but with personal computing being attacked every year, I would not hold my breath.

> Once you get to uATX and larger, this could potentially be via a PCIe adapter card too, right?

Sure, but then you have to budget your PCIe lanes. And once you get to a certain scale (a very small one in fact) then you have to consider getting a Threadripper board + CPU, and that increases the expense anywhere from 3x to 8x.

I thought about it lately and honestly it's either a Threadripper workstation with all the huge expenses that entails, or I'd probably just settle for an ITX form factor, cram it with 2-3 huge NVMe SSDs (8TB each), have a really good GPU and quiet cooling... and just expand horizontally if I ever need anything else (and make VERY sure it has at least two USB 4 / Thunderbolt ports that don't gimp the bandwidth to your SSDs or GPU so the expansion would be at 100% capacity).

Meaning that going for a classic PC does not makes sense if you want an internally expandable workstation. What's the point in a consumer board + a Ryzen 9950X and a big normal PC case if I can't put more than two old-school HDDs in there? Just to have a better airflow? Meh. I can put 2-3 Noctua coolers in an ITX case and it might even be quieter.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#113

Post by rasz »

toast0 wrote: post #14
poly2it wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well does buying PCIe to M.2 adapters work for a custom NAS? Slot-wise you should be able to get 16 M.2 devices per motherboard with for example a Supermicro consumer board.

The difficulty with pcie to m.2 adapters is you usually can't use bifurcation below x4 and active PCIe switches got very expensive after PCIe 3.0. Used multiport SATA HBA cards are inexpensive on eBay. Multiport nvme cards are either passive for bifurcation and give you 4x x4 for an x16 slot or are active and very expensive. I don't see how you get to 16 m.2 devices on a consumer socket without lots of expense.

PCI switches got very expensive after Broadcom bought PLX.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#114

Post by rasz »

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…

USB, even 3.2 doesnt support DMA mastering thus is bad for anything requiring performance.

USB4 is just passing PCIE traffic and should be fine, but at that point you are paying >$150 per usb4 hub (because mobos have two at most) and >$50 per m.2 converter.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#115

Post by justsomehnguy »

tracker1 wrote: post #96
justsomehnguy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, mainstream PCs only need one type of internal drive More so it would only need one drive. ODD is dead for at least 10 years and most people never need another internal drive at all.

Still use ODD for ripping... that said, I'm using a USB3 BRW drive and it's been fine for what I need.

I'm not even sure if CD/DVDs are selling anywhere. Sure, there are some niche shops out there, along with flea and retro markets but otherwise...

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#116

Post by tracker1 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #115
tracker1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still use ODD for ripping... that said, I'm using a USB3 BRW drive and it's been fine for what I need.

I'm not even sure if CD/DVDs are selling anywhere. Sure, there are some niche shops out there, along with flea and retro markets but otherwise...

It's admittedly been harder than it used to be... I've been less inclined to buy CDs over just using streaming audio, since I pay for YouTube to go ad free, I use the music streaming kind of as a bonus.

On the Blu-ray front, I've tended to buy Blu-ray where available, but have bought DVD sets as well. There's also the high seas, so to speak for content that is not available for purchase/rent. I'd actually pay for a good AI upscaler software for DVD content if it worked under Linux (natively or via WINE). I left Windows outside of work a few years ago and not going back... I'm perfectly happy to pay for good, useful software even if I'm more inclined to look for open-source solutions first.

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