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Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

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Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#81

Post by justsomehnguy »

pjdesno wrote: post #75
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…

> Maybe a boot drive for some VM host? Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche. I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be…

Anything later than and including x4x has M.2 BOSS support and in 2026 you shouldn't buy anything lower than 14th gen. But yes, cheap SSDs serve well as the ESXi boot drives.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#82

Post by zamadatix »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #70
zamadatix wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keep in mind 'SATA SSD' != '2.5" SSD' as m.2 SSDs can be SATA as well.

Even then, I suppose it how the m.2 vs 2.5" SATA mounting turns out depends on the specific system. E.g. on this PC the main NVMe slot is above the GPU but mounting a 2.5" SSD is 4 screws on a custom sled + cabling once mounted. If it were the other way around and the NVMe was screw-in only below the GPU while the SSD had an easy mount then it might be a different story.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#83

Post by zamadatix »

dana321 wrote: post #79
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.

its not enough if you have four ssds each with 4tb for instance

Is it not fair to say 4x4 TB SSD is an example of at least a prosumer use case (barrier there is more like ~10 before needing workstation/server gear)? Joe Schmoe is doing on the better half of Steam gamers if he's rocking a 1x2 TB SSD as his primary drive.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#84

Post by 0134340 »

nemomarx wrote: post #19
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…

Where do you add more storage after you've used your 1-2 nvme slots and the m.2? I would think an SSD is going to be better than a spinning disc even with the limits of sata if you want to archive things or work with larger data or whatever

There are SATA SSD enclosures for M.2 drives. Those are cheap enough now that granny can still upgrade her old PC on the cheap.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#85

Post by ComputerGuru »

mgerdts wrote: post #66
ComputerGuru wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I'm saying assuming that m.2 slots are sufficient to replace SATA is folly because it is only talking about SSDs.

And SATA SSDs do make sense, they are significantly more cost effective than NVMe and trivial to expand. Compare the simplicity, ease, and cost of building an array/pool of many disks comprised of either 2.5" SATA SSDs or M.2 NVMe and get back to me when you have a solution that can scale to 8, 14, or 60 disks as easily and cheaply as the SATA option can. There are many cases where the performance of SSDs going over ACHI (or SAS) is plenty and you don't need to pay the cost of going to full-on PCIe lanes per disk.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#86

Post by zamadatix »

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.

On top of what the others have said, any faster interface you replace SATA with will have the same problem set because it's rooted in the total bandwidth to the CPU, not the form factor of the slot.

E.g. going to the suggested U.2 is still going to net you looking for the PCIe lanes to be available for it.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#87

Post by ls612 »

crote wrote: post #18
tart-lemonade wrote: post #9

I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed. The SATA SSD market has basically turned into a dumping ground for low quality flash and controllers, with the 870s being the only consistently good drives still in production after Crucial discontinued the MX500. It's the end of an era.

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…

I bought 2 of the 870 QVOs a few years ago and put them in software RAID 0 for my steam library. They cost significantly less per TB than the M.2 drives at the time.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#88

Post by wtallis »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #85
mgerdts wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I'm saying assuming that m.2 slots are sufficient to replace SATA is folly because it is only talking about SSDs. And SATA SSDs do make sense, they are significantly more cost effective than NVMe and trivial to expand. Compare the simplicity, ease, and cost of building an array/pool of many disks comprised of either 2.5" SATA SSDs or M.2 NVMe and get back to me when you have a solution that can scale to 8, 14, or…

> And SATA SSDs do make sense, they are significantly more cost effective than NVMe

That doesn't seem to be what the vendors think, and they're probably in a better position to know what's selling well and how much it costs to build.

We're probably reaching the point where the up-front costs of qualifying new NAND with old SATA SSD controllers and updating the firmware to properly manage the new NAND is a cost that cannot be recouped by a year or two of sales of an updated SATA SSD.

SATA SSDs are a technological dead end that's no longer economically important for consumer storage or large scale datacenter deployments. The one remaining niche you've pointed to (low-performance storage servers) is not a large enough market to sustain anything like the product ecosystem that existed a decade ago for SATA SSDs.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#89

Post by wtallis »

0134340 wrote: post #84
nemomarx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you add more storage after you've used your 1-2 nvme slots and the m.2? I would think an SSD is going to be better than a spinning disc even with the limits of sata if you want to archive things or work with larger data or whatever

There are SATA SSD enclosures for M.2 drives. Those are cheap enough now that granny can still upgrade her old PC on the cheap.

Link? An adapter allowing a M.2 SATA SSD to be used in a 2.5" SATA enclosure is cheap and dead simple: just needs a 5V to 3.3V regulator. But that doesn't help. Connecting a M.2 NVMe SSD to a SATA host port would be much more exotic, and I don't recall ever hearing about someone producing the silicon necessary to make that work.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#90

Post by wtallis »

pjdesno wrote: post #75
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…

> Maybe a boot drive for some VM host? Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche. I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be…

M.2 boot drives for servers have been popular for years. There's a whole product segment of server boot drives that are relatively low capacity, sometimes even using the consumer form factor (80mm long instead of 110mm) but still including power loss protection. Marvell even made a hardware RAID0/1 controller for NVMe specifically to handle this use case. Nobody's adding a SAS HBA to a server that didn't already need one, and nobody's making any cheap low-port-count SAS HBAs.
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