alt Hacker NewsSamsung may end SATA SSD production soon
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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.)
I have some older SATA SSD's in my PC currently. I'd not buy a new one, too slow compared to NVME.
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.
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).
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'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).
Probably no longer profitable and they can change that production capacity to something that is.
I haven't even seen a SATA SSD in 5+ years. Don't know anyone that uses them.
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 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.
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. :/
If Samsung (maybe) ends SSD production and Crucial existing the consumer business, what is the next best alternative for SSD products?
I thought Samsung was the de facto choice for high-quality SSD products.
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.
Fsck this cartel.. I hope China will fill these gaps and help restore normal prices.
People are at same time complaining about data slow but they seem to happily paying AWS 10x for less iops and bandwidth.
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.