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Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

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Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#51

Post by wtallis »

nonameiguess wrote: post #30
xyse53 wrote: post #3

I've noticed there aren't a lot of reasonable home/sb m.2 NVME NAS options for main boards and enclosures. SATA SSD still seems like the way you have to go for a 5 to 8 drive system (boot disk + 4+ raid6).

I don't now if you consider it "reasonable" but the Gigabye Aorus TRX boards even from 6 years ago came with a free PCIE expansion card that held 8 M2 sticks, up to 32 TB on a consumer board. It's eATX, of course, so quite a bit bigger than an appliance NAS, and the socket is for a threadripper, more suitable for a hypervisor than a NAS, but if you're willing to blow five to ten grand and be severely overprovisioned,…

Are you sure? I've seen plenty of motherboards bundle a PCIe riser to passively bifurcate the PCIe slot to support four M.2 drives in an x16 slot or two in an x8 slot, but doing eight M.2 drives in one PCIe slot would either require a PCIe switch that would be too expensive for a free bundled card, or require PCIe bifurcation down to two lanes per link, which I don't think any workstation CPUs have ever supported. And 32TB is possible with just four M.2 SSDs.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#52

Post by pjdesno »

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 can just plug in SAS drives instead of SATA.

#3 - there's an enterprise market for capacity drives with a lower per-device cost overhead than NVMe - it's surprisingly expensive to build a box that will hold dozens of NVMe drives - but SAS is twice as fast as SATA, and you can re-use the adapters and mechanicals that you're already using for SATA. (pretty much every non-motherboard SATA adapter is SAS/SATA already, and has been that way for a decade)

#4 - cloud uses capacity HDDs and both performance and capacity NVMe. They probably buy >50% of the HDD capacity sold today; I'm not sure what share of the SSD market they buy. The vendors produce whatever the big cloud providers want; I assume this announcement means SATA SSDs aren't on their list.

I would guess that SATA will stay on the market for a long time in two forms: - crap SSDs, for the die-hards on HN and other places :-) - HDDs, because they don't need the higher SAS transfer rate for the foreseeable future, and for the drive vendor it's probably just a different firmware load on the same silicon.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#53

Post by zamadatix »

gary_0 wrote: post #39

I wonder if this move has anything to do with SATA SSDs being a common upgrade for older PCs, but those will just go in the trash now that Windows 10 is EOL and Windows 11 will refuse to run on most of them? (I assume only a small percentage will be switched to Linux instead.)

If I were to bet on my hunches: At least half, leaning more, of that 20% buying SATA SSDs is probably momentum of people who didn't know they could get a better performing m.2 NVMe drive for the same price. Few people are upgrading PCs with SSDs for the first time in 2025 and those that are probably didn't really need SATA, they just searched for SATA/saw SATA.

I don't really know how one would get numbers for any of the above one way or the other though.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#54

Post by zokier »

zamadatix wrote: post #48
mwambua wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that we'll start to see SATA replaced with faster interfaces in the future? Something like U.2/U.3 that's currently available to the enterprise?

NVMe via m.2 remains more than fine for covering the consumer SSD use cases.

Problem is that you only get pitiful amount of m2 slots in mainstream motherboards.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#55

Post by wtallis »

zokier wrote: post #54
zamadatix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVMe via m.2 remains more than fine for covering the consumer SSD use cases.

Problem is that you only get pitiful amount of m2 slots in mainstream motherboards.

Three is not pitiful. Three is plenty for mainstream use cases, which is what mainstream motherboards are designed for.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#56

Post by Night_Thastus »

zokier wrote: post #54
zamadatix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVMe via m.2 remains more than fine for covering the consumer SSD use cases.

Problem is that you only get pitiful amount of m2 slots in mainstream motherboards.

A lot of modern boards come with 3 or more - that's what mine has. And with modern density, that's a LOT of storage. I have two 4TB drives!

You could even get more using a PCIe NVME expansion card, since it's all over PCIe anyways.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#57

Post by zokier »

gary_0 wrote: post #39

I wonder if this move has anything to do with SATA SSDs being a common upgrade for older PCs, but those will just go in the trash now that Windows 10 is EOL and Windows 11 will refuse to run on most of them? (I assume only a small percentage will be switched to Linux instead.)

On the other hand nvme has been around for >10 years (since z97 from 2014 I guess).

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#58

Post by wtallis »

vachina wrote: post #42
jajuuka wrote: post #31

SATA SSD's are in a weird space. HDD are cheaper and more reliable for large storage pools. NVME is everywhere and provides those quick speeds and are even faster if you need that. There just aren't many use cases where SATA SSD's are the best option.

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

Lots of consumer SATA SSDs don't have any thermal pads between the PCB and the case, and plastic cases are common. Heat just isn't a problem for a drive that's only drawing 2-3W under load.

And most consumer NVMe SSDs don't need any extra cooling for normal use cases, because consumer workloads only generate bursts of high-speed IO and don't sustain high power draw long enough for cooling to be a serious concern.

In the datacenter space where it is actually reasonable to expect drives to be busy around the clock, nobody's been trying to get away with passive cooling even for SATA SSDs.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#59

Post by verall »

wtallis wrote: post #50
barrkel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, SATA and NVMe are mutually incompatible concepts for a single device; SATA drives use AHCI to wrap ATA commands in a SCSI-shaped queuing mechanism called command lists over the SATA bus, while NVMe (M.2/U.2/add-in) drives talk NVMe protocol (multiple queues) over PCIe.

For a drive , yes, SATA and NVMe are mutually exclusive. The M.2 slot can provide both options. But if you have a machine with a M.2 slot that's only wired for SATA but not PCIe, your choices for drives to put in that slot have been quite limited for a long time.

There were even M.2 PCIe-connected AHCI drives - both not-SATA and not-NVMe. Samsung SM951 was one. You can find them on ebay but not otherwise.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#60

Post by wtallis »

verall wrote: post #59
wtallis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a drive , yes, SATA and NVMe are mutually exclusive. The M.2 slot can provide both options. But if you have a machine with a M.2 slot that's only wired for SATA but not PCIe, your choices for drives to put in that slot have been quite limited for a long time.

There were even M.2 PCIe-connected AHCI drives - both not-SATA and not-NVMe. Samsung SM951 was one. You can find them on ebay but not otherwise.

At least the Samsung and SanDisk PCIe AHCI M.2 drives were only for PC OEMs and were not officially sold as retail products. There were gray-market resellers, but overall it was a niche and short-lived format. Especially because any system that shipped with a PCIe M.2 slot could gain NVMe capability if the OEM deigned to release an appropriate UEFI firmware update.
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