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Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

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Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#91

Post by saltcured »

0manrho wrote: post #80
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?

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 the host. But from a performance perspective, it seems reasonable to switch to USB once you are multiplexing drives over the same, limited IO channels from the CPU to expand capacity rather than bandwidth.

Once you get out of this smallest consumer expansion scenario, I think NAS takes over as the most sensible architecture for small office/home office settings.

Other SAN variants really only make sense in datacenter architectures where you are trying to optimize for very well-defined server/storage traffic patterns.

Is there any drawback to going towards USB for multiplexed storage inside a desktop PC or NAS chassis too? It feels like the days of RAID cards are over, given the desire for host-managed, software-defined storage abstractions.

Does SAS still have some benefit here?

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#92

Post by wtallis »

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…

I wouldn't trust any USB-attached storage to be reliable enough for anything more than periodic incremental backups and verification scrubs. USB devices disappear from the bus too often for me to want to rely on them for online storage.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#93

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

Aurornis wrote: post #62
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?

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.

It's for hdds. We still use those for massive storage

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#94

Post by saltcured »

wtallis wrote: post #92
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…

I wouldn't trust any USB-attached storage to be reliable enough for anything more than periodic incremental backups and verification scrubs. USB devices disappear from the bus too often for me to want to rely on them for online storage.

OK, I see that is a potential downside. I can actually remember way back when we used to see sporadic disconnects and bus resets for IDE drives in Linux and it would recover and keep going.

I wonder what it would take to get the same behavior out of USB as for other "internal" interconnects, i.e. say this is attached storage and do retry/reconnect instead of deciding any ephemeral disconnect is a "removal event"...?

FWIW, I've actually got a 1 TB Samsung "pro" NVMe/M.2 drive in an external case, currently attached to a spare Ryzen-based Thinkpad via USB-C. I'm using it as an alternate boot drive to store and play Linux Steam games. It performs quite well. I'd say is qualitatively like the OEM internal NVMe drive when doing disk-intensive things, but maybe that is bottlenecked by the Linux LUKS full-disk encryption?

Also, this is essentially a docked desktop setup. There's nothing jostling the USB cable to the SSD.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#95

Post by tracker1 »

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.

My desktop motherboard has 4... not sure how many you need, even if 8tb drives are pretty pricey. Though actual PCIe lanes in consumer CPUs are limited. If you bump up to ThreadRipper, you can use PCIe to M.2 adapters to add lots of drives.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#96

Post by tracker1 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #77
wtallis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#97

Post by tracker1 »

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 remember running my first NVME drive via a PCIe adapter on my i7 4790K about a decade ago... man, that was a game changer for sure, almost as much as going from HDD to SSD on SATA around 2009.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#98

Post by tracker1 »

throwaway94275 wrote: post #38
1970-01-01 wrote: post #32

What I want to know is if this is the beginning of the end of the SATA era. Once one major player leaves, others are sure to follow, and soon quality no longer matters, and finally the tech atrophies. I don't want to be forced to have my spinning platters connected via NVMe and a series of connector adapters.

PCIe SATA adapters will likely be around forever. They may be problematic to boot from, but A) I'm sure your OS isn't on a spinning disk, and B) by the time PCIe SATA adapters disappear the entire concept of a PC will be an outlawed or legacy retro thing anyway.

Agreed... although it would be nice to find easier support for older formats, they do stick around for a while. I've got a 3.5" USB floppy in my garage that's been sitting for over a decade now, and even then it was long after CD/BR and thumb drives were the norm.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#99

Post by tracker1 »

pzmarzly wrote: post #5
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).

When it comes to ready-made home/SMB-grade NASes, in recent year or two plenty of options popped up: Terramaster F8, Flashstor 6 or 12, BeeLink ME mini N150 (6x NVMe). It's just QNAP and Synology who seem not interested.

Probably because QNAP and Synology pricing is rent seeking behavior on per drive bay pricing models.

Re: Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

#100

Post by tracker1 »

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.

Not to mention, the physical x16 slot may be running in x8 mode if you're using a video card.
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