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.
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.<p>I don't really know how one would get numbers for any of the above one way or the other though.
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.<p>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.<p>Even then, I suppose it depends how the m.2 and 2.5" SATA mounting works depends on the 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.
> 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.<p>This doesn't make sense as written. I suspect you meant to say "SATA SSDs" (or just "SATA") in the first sentence instead of "SSDs", and M.2 instead of NVMe in the second sentence. This kind of discussion is much easier to have when it isn't polluted by sloppy misnaming.
On the other hand nvme has been around for >10 years (since z97 from 2014 I guess).
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.
Consumer chipsets have long supported USB, SATA, and PCIe using shared PHYs giving motherboard vendors some flexibility to decide which IO lanes they would like to wire up to SATA connectors vs USB connectors vs PCIe/M.2 connectors. (This worked <i>great</i> when all three were in the 5-6Gbps range.) Since SATA is now the slowest of those three interfaces, it doesn't really drive up the die cost much. It's pretty cheap for the chipset to continue to have a few SATA MACs on die, and giving the motherboard vendor the option to use the PHYs for USB or PCIe means there's no significant opportunity cost or inflation to the pin count to support SATA.<p>We've already seen the typical number of SATA ports on a consumer desktop motherboard drop from six to four or two. We'll probably go through a period where zero is common but four is still an option on some motherboards with the same silicon, before SATA gets removed from the silicon.
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.
> I don't want to be forced to have my spinning platters connected via NVM<p>It's called a PCIe disk controller and you just accustomized to have one built-in in the south bridge.
> I don't want to be forced to have my spinning platters connected via NVMe and a series of connector adapters.<p>I want to build a mini PC-based 3D printed NAS box with a SATA backplate with that exact NVME connector adapter setup!<p><a href="https://makerworld.com/en/models/1644686-n5-mini-a-3d-printed-5-bay-nas-175x175mm" rel="nofollow">https://makerworld.com/en/models/1644686-n5-mini-a-3d-printe...</a><p>The reality is, as long as you have PCIe you can do pretty much whatever you want, and it's not a big deal.
I've noticed there aren't a lot of reasonable home/sb m.2 NVME NAS options for main boards and enclosures.<p>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):<p>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.<p>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 <60C under sustained benching of all of the drives raw, and more like <40 C given ZFS doesn't like to go more than 8 GB/s in this setup anyways. If you select $600 top end SSDs with high wattage controllers shipping with heatsinks you might have more of a problem, otherwise it's like 100 W max for the 22 drives and easy enough to cool.<p>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.<p>The biggest downsides I ran across were:<p>- 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.<p>- It costs more, obviously<p>- Not using a chassis designed for massive numbers of drives with hot-swap access can be quite the pain to troubleshoot install for.<p>The biggest upsides (other than the obvious ones) I ran across were:<p>- No spinup drain on the PSU<p>- No need to worry about drive powersaving/idling <- pairs with -> whole solution is quiet enough to sit in my living room without hearing drive whine.<p>- I don't look like a struggling fool trying to move a full chassis around :)
Its also quite difficult to find 2280 M.2 SATA SSD. Had an old laptop that only takes 2280 M.2 SATA SSD.<p>Its always one of the 2. M.2 but PCIe/NVMe, or SATA but not M.2.
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 <i>drive</i>, 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.
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.
If you want to go big in capacity, which is something you usually want for NAS, m.2 becomes super expensive.
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.<p>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.<p>I don't see how you get to 16 m.2 devices on a consumer socket without lots of expense.
I don't think there are any consumer boards which support this?<p>In practice you can put 4 drives in the x16 slot intended for a GPU, 1 drive each in any remaining PCIe slots, plus whatever is available onboard. 8 should be doable, but I doubt you can go beyond 12.<p>I know there are some $2000 PCIe cards with onboard switches so you can stick 8 NVMe drives on there - even with an x1 upstream connection - but at that point you're better off going for a Threadripper board.
Can you point to a specific motherboard? 16 separate PCIe links of any width sounds rather high for a consumer platform.
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, you can build a hell of a rig.
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.
I've been buying only Samsung for about seven or eight years. I got a four-bay M.2 Thunderbolt 4 RAID enclosure in 2022 and I couldn't be happier with it. It absolutely smokes everything else I have (other than my internal SSD).<p>Tech news has been quite the bummer in the last few months. I'm running out of things to anticipate in my nerd hobby.
I have some older SATA SSD's in my PC currently. I'd not buy a new one, too slow compared to NVME.
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.<p>It's the end of an era.
The thing is, what's the market for them?<p>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.<p>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? <i>Maybe</i> a boot drive for some VM host?
> Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?<p>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.<p>I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be replaced without opening the machine, too, which is a major win - every time you pull the machine out on its rails and pop the top is another opportunity for cables to come out or other things to go wrong.
Where do you add more storage after you've used your 1-2 nvme slots and the m.2?<p>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
Counterpoint: who needs that much fast storage?<p>4 M.2 NVMe drives is quite doable, and you can put 8TB drives in each. There are very few people who need more than 32TB of fast data access, who aren't going to invest in enterprise hardware instead.<p>Pre-hype, for bulk storage SSDs are around $70/TB, whereas spinning drives are around $17/TB. Are you really willing to pay <i>that</i> much more for <i>slightly</i> higher speeds on that once-per-month access to archived data?<p>In reality you're probably going to end up with a 4TB NVMe drive or two for working data, and a bunch of 20TB+ spinning drives for your data archive.
You can actually get a decent 4TB USB-C drive from Samsung. For most home users those are fast and big enough. If you get a mac, the SSD is soldered on the main board typically. And you can get up to 8TB now. That's a trend that some other laptop builders are probably following. There's no need for separate SATA drives anymore except for a shrinking group of enthusiast home builders.<p>I have a couple of 2TB USB-C SSDs. I haven't bought a separate SATA drive in well over a decade. My last home built PC broke around 2013.
Only SATA made it common for motherboards or adapters to support more than 2-4 hard drives. We're back to what we used to do before SATA: when you're out of space you replace the smallest drive with something larger.
pcie expansion cards? SATA isn’t free and takes away from having potentially more PCIE lanes, so the only real difference here is the connector
PCIE expansion card with m2 slots?<p>(SSDs are "fine", just playing devil's advocate.)
Cheaper, sturdier, and more easily swappable than NVME while still being far faster than spinning discs.
I use them basically as independent cartridges, this one's work, that one's a couple TB of raw video files plus the associated editor project, that one has games and movies. I can confidently travel with 3-4 unprotected in my bag.<p>There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.
It’s a shame. I’m really enjoying their SATA 8TB QLC SSDs in RAID0 for mostly read-only data. It seems like I cannot scale my system vertically in the same manner. :/
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<p>#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.<p>#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.<p>#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)<p>#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.<p>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.
If Samsung (maybe) ends SSD production and Crucial existing the consumer business, what is the next best alternative for SSD products?<p>I thought Samsung was the de facto choice for high-quality SSD products.
Probably no longer profitable and they can change that production capacity to something that is.<p>I haven't even seen a SATA SSD in 5+ years. Don't know anyone that uses them.
Earlier: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266070">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266070</a>
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: <a href="https://www.myfixguide.com/samsung-860-pro-ssd-teardown/" rel="nofollow">https://www.myfixguide.com/samsung-860-pro-ssd-teardown/</a><p>And even in worst-case hammering of drives, thermally throttled NVMEs can still sustain higher speeds than SATA drives.
Lots of consumer SATA SSDs don't have <i>any</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
SATA SSDs have one advantage though - their size. You don't see m.2 form factor SSDs going well over 8TBs, but for a larger SATA drive you can find >8TBs easily. Samsung had the best offering for this recently - Samsung SSD 870 QVO
The enterprise world has U2, but us plebs don't really have a comparable alternative.
Fsck this cartel.. I hope China will fill these gaps and help restore normal prices.
China has also wisened up and is limiting supplies also. Their B2C marketplace is seeing less and less >1TB SSDs and even those who sell I've seen prices x2 in the span of two months.
You will be down-voted to hell for this comment, but luckily their down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...
> down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...<p>People like you and I pay tariffs. Not China. You realize that right? And how will that stop China? Tariffs mostly hurt American consumers and producers. Just ask farmers.
He's being downvoted because it's a dumb, knee-jerk comment. This has nothing to do with RAM, the thing getting really expensive at the moment, and Samsung isn't even stopping SSD production (which <i>would</i> be worth getting really mad about). It's about stopping production for a specific interface which has long since been saturated by even the cheapest, crummiest SSDs.<p>SATA SSDs don't really have much of a reason to exist anymore (and to the extent they do, certainly not by Samsung, who specializes in the biggest, baddest, fastest drives you can buy and is probably happy to leave the low end of the market to others).
People are at same time complaining about data slow but they seem to happily paying AWS 10x for less iops and bandwidth.