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> I expect the price of NVMe drives to drop over the next few years until they're cheap enough that the majority of computers are running NVMe drives. Price n
by wtallis 6y ago
> I expect the price of NVMe drives to drop over the next few years until they're cheap enough that the majority of computers are running NVMe drives.
Price no longer has anything to do with it. PC OEMs are simply not shipping SATA SSDs any more, and major drive vendors have started to discontinue their client (OEM) SATA SSD product lines. We're just waiting for the SATA-based PC install base to be retired.
- im3w1l 6y agoMy mobo has many more SATA slots than M.2. slots. I expect there will be hybrid systems for quite a while.
- wtallis 6y agoOne SSD is sufficient for almost all consumer systems. The only reason to want more than two SSDs is if you're re-using at least one old tiny SSD in a new machine. SATA ports will stick around in desktops only for the sake of hard drives. There may be a few niches left where using several SATA SSDs in a workstation still makes some kind of sense, and obviously not all server platforms have migrated to NVMe yet. But as far as influencing the direction and design of consumer systems, SATA SSDs have only slightly more relevance than optical disc drives.
- p1necone 6y agoDrive price doesn't scale linearly with capacity, you can save a fair bit of money sticking with multiple smaller capacity drives vs one big one.
- wtallis 6y agoDrive price per GB doesn't even scale monotonically with capacity. Right now, the best price per GB is usually on 1TB or 2TB models. And if you need more than two such devices with SSD performance, you're far outside the bounds of consumer computing and into workstation territory.
- int_19h 6y agoIt depends on what you mean by "consumer computing", really. The single largest app using up my disk space is Steam, and if I only had a single 1 Tb SSD, it'd be full by now.
- aidenn0 6y agoI have 8 SATA SSDs in my workstation; are there motherboards that could run a similar NVMe setup?
- wtallis 6y agoI wasn't including the workstation market when I referred to what PC OEMs are doing. Are you using 8 consumer SATA SSDs in your workstation? Is it for the sake of increased capacity, or for the sake of increased performance? Because it's pretty easy now to match the performance of an 8-drive SATA RAID-0 with a single NVMe drive, but 8TB consumer NVMe SSDs are still 50% more expensive than 8TB consumer SATA SSDs. (Also, even 8 SATA ports is above average for consumer motherboards; it looks like about 17% of the retail desktop motherboard models currently on the market have at least 8 SATA ports.)
- aidenn0 6y agoIncreased capacity. I started with 4 spinning disks, replaced them with SSDs a while ago and then grew it to 8.
- eightysixfour 6y agoYes, using PCIe expansion cards. I know of an AMD board that ships with 5 (3 on the board, 2 with a PCIe card). Could easily add more.
- fibers 6y agois this with threadripper boards?
- wtallis 6y ago3 M.2 slots is common even on AMD's mainstream X570 and B550 platforms. I don't know if any of those motherboards also bundle riser cards for further M.2 PCIe SSDs, but they do support PCIe bifurcation so you can run your GPU at PCIe 4.0 x8 and use the second x16/x8 slot to run two more SSDs in a passive riser purchased separately.