Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

techradar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 116 posts

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#61

Post by Marsymars »

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.

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.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#62

Post by Aurornis »

mwambua wrote: post #20
Neil44 wrote: post #6

Samsung makes fast expensive storage but even cheap storage can max out SATA, hence there's no point Samsung trying to compete in the dwindling SATA space.

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?

The first NVMe over PCIe consumer drive was launched a decade ago.

It's hard to even find new PC builds using SATA drives.

SATA was phased out many years ago. The primary market for SATA SSDs is upgrading old systems or maybe the absolute lowest cost system integrators at this point, but it's a dwindling market.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#63

Post by ComputerGuru »

wtallis wrote: post #55
zokier wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We used to have motherboards with six or twelve SATA ports. And SATA HDDs have way more capacity than the paltry (yet insanely expensive) options available with NVMe.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#64

Post by Aurornis »

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.

Most consumer motherboards have 2-3 M.2 slots.

You can buy cheap add-in cards to use PCIe slots as M.2 slots, too.

If you need even more slots, there are add-in cards with PCIe switches which allow you to install 10+ M.2 drives into a single M.2 slot.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#65

Post by razster »

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.

The MSI motherboard I use has 3, and with the PCIe expansion card installed, I have 7 m.2's. There are some expansion cards with 8 m.2 slots. You can also get SATA to m.2 devices, or my fav is USB-c drives that hold 2 m.2. Getting great speeds from that little device.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#66

Post by mgerdts »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #63
wtallis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We used to have motherboards with six or twelve SATA ports. And SATA HDDs have way more capacity than the paltry (yet insanely expensive) options available with NVMe.

This article is talking about SATA SSDs, not HDDs. While the NVMe spec does allow for MVMe HDDs, it seems silly to waste even one PCIe lane on a HDD. SATA HDDs continue to make sense.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#67

Post by zamadatix »

rpcope1 wrote: post #8
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).

It seems like it's rare to find M.2 with the sort of things you'd want in a NAS like PLP, reasonably high DWPD, good controllers, etc. and you've also got to contend with the problem of managing heat in a way I had never seen with 2.5 or 3.5 drives. I would imagine the sort of people doing NVMe for NAS/SAN/servers are all probably using U.2 or U.3 (I know I do).

I've been doing my home NASes in m.2 NVMe for years now with 12 disks on one and 22 disks on another (backup still HDD though):

DWPD: Between the random teamgroup drives in the main NAS and WD Red Pro HDDs in the backup, the write limits are actually about the same. With the bonus reads are infinite on the SSDs, so things like scheduled ZFS scrubs don't count as 100 TB of usage across the pool each time.

Heat: Actually easier to manage than the HDDs. The drives are smaller (so denser for the same wattage) but the peak wattage is lower than the idle spinning wattage of the HDDs and there isn't a large physical buffer between the hot parts and the airflow. My normal case airflow keeps them at PLP: More problematic if this is part of your use case, as NVMe drives with PLP will typically lead you straight into enterprise pricing. Personally my use case is more "on demand large file access" with extremely low churn data regularly backed up for the long term and I'm not at a loss if I have an issue and need to roll back to yesterday's data, but others who use things more as an active drive may have different considerations.

The biggest downsides I ran across were:

- Loading up all of the lanes on a modern consumer board works in theory, can be buggy as hell in practice. Anything from the boot becoming EXTREMELY long to just not working at all sometimes to PCIe errors during operation. Used Epyc in a normal PC case is the way to go instead.

- It costs more, obviously

- Not using a chassis designed for massive numbers of drives with hot-swap access can be quite the pain to troubleshoot install for.

The biggest upsides (other than the obvious ones) I ran across were:

- No spinup drain on the PSU

- No need to worry about drive powersaving/idling whole solution is quiet enough to sit in my living room without hearing drive whine.

- I don't look like a struggling fool trying to move a full chassis around :)

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#68

Post by wtallis »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #63
wtallis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We used to have motherboards with six or twelve SATA ports. And SATA HDDs have way more capacity than the paltry (yet insanely expensive) options available with NVMe.

We used to want to connect SSDs, hard drives and optical drives, all to SATA ports. Now, mainstream PCs only need one type of internal drive. Hard drives and optical drives are solidly out of the mainstream and have been for quite a while, so it's natural that motherboards don't need as many ports.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#70

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

zamadatix wrote: post #53
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…

I prefer SSDs because the connector is so much more accessible. Ripping out the video card and futzing with the pain of that tiny NVME screw is no fun.

I am almost never IO blocked where the performance difference between the two matters. I guess when I do the initial full backup image of my drive, but after that, everything is incremental.

Post reply on HN