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Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266070
- xyse53 10mo agoI'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).
- pzmarzly 10mo agoWhen 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.
- tracker1 10mo agoProbably because QNAP and Synology pricing is rent seeking behavior on per drive bay pricing models.
- poly2it 10mo agoHow 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.
- wtallis 10mo agoCan you point to a specific motherboard? 16 separate PCIe links of any width sounds rather high for a consumer platform.
- poly2it 10mo agoC9X299-RPGF https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/C9X299-RPGF https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/C9X299-RP...
- crote 10mo agoThat's a workstation board, not a regular consumer board, and it is over 5 years old by now - it has even been discontinued by Supermicro. Buiding a new system with that in 2025 would be a bit silly.
- toast0 10mo agoA few generations old, and HEDT, which isn't exactly consumer but ok. I see one for $100 on ebay, so that's not awful either. Even that gives you one m.2 slot, and 8/8/8/16 on the x16 slots, if you have the right cpu. Assuming those are can all bifurcate down to x4 (which is most common), that gets you 10 m.2 slots out of the 40 lanes. That's more than you'd get on a modern desktop board, but it's not 16 either. For home use, you're in a tricky spot; can't get it in one box, so horizontal scaling seems like a good avenue. But in order to do horizontal scaling, you probably need high speed networking, and if you take lanes for that, you don't have many lanes left for storage. Anyway, I don't think there's much simple software to scale out storage over multiple nodes; there's stuff out there, but it's not simple and it's not really targeted towards a small node count. But, if you don't really need high speed, a big array of spinning disks is still approachable.
- toast0 10mo agoThe 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.
- crote 10mo agoI don't think there are any consumer boards which support this? 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. 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.
- rpcope1 10mo agoIt 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).
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 10mo agoIts also quite difficult to find 2280 M.2 SATA SSD. Had an old laptop that only takes 2280 M.2 SATA SSD. Its always one of the 2. M.2 but PCIe/NVMe, or SATA but not M.2.
- barrkel 10mo agoFwiw, 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.
- wtallis 10mo agoFor a drive, 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.
- verall 10mo agoThere were even M.2 PCIe-connected AHCI drives - both not-SATA and not-NVMe. Samsung SM951 was one. You can find them on ebay but not otherwise.
- wtallis 10mo agoAt least the Samsung and SanDisk PCIe AHCI M.2 drives were only for PC OEMs and were not officially sold as retail products. There were gray-market resellers, but overall it was a niche and short-lived format. Especially because any system that shipped with a PCIe M.2 slot could gain NVMe capability if the OEM deigned to release an appropriate UEFI firmware update.
- nonameiguess 10mo agoI 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.
- wtallis 10mo agoAre 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.
- ekropotin 10mo agoIf you want to go big in capacity, which is something you usually want for NAS, m.2 becomes super expensive.
- zb3 10mo agoFsck this cartel.. I hope China will fill these gaps and help restore normal prices.
- Flavius 10mo agoYou will be down-voted to hell for this comment, but luckily their down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...
- Analemma_ 10mo agoHe'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 would 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. 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).
- zb3 10mo agoFunnily enough, I wasn't even downvoted yet :D But you see, it's hard to post smarter comments when the title and the article don't help..
- cheema33 10mo ago> down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though... 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.
- tracker1 10mo agoFirst, cost != price. Pricing is in part based on competitive product availability. So if the cost of a product + tariff is greater than the cost of a competing product, there is pressure to reduce that cost. There's also pressure to produce elsewhere, such as domestically to avoid the tariff altogether. This is a large part of why the tariffs have in fact not had the dramatic impact on all pricing that some have suggested would happen. It's been largely a negotiation tactic first, and second, many products have plenty of margin and competition to allow for pricing to remain relatively level even in the face of tariffs... so it absolutely can, in fact be a burden borne by Chinese manufacturers by lowering margins instead of US importers simply eating the cost of tariffs.
- Neil44 10mo agoSamsung 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.
- mwambua 10mo agoDoes 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?
- barrkel 10mo agoIt's more likely that third party integrators will look after the demand for SSD SAS/SATA devices, and the demand won't go away because SAS multiplexers are cheap and NVMe/PCIe is point to point and expensive to make switching hardware for. Likely we'd need a different protocol to make scaling up the number of high speed SSDs in a single box to work well.
- zamadatix 10mo agoNVMe via m.2 remains more than fine for covering the consumer SSD use cases.
- zokier 10mo agoProblem is that you only get pitiful amount of m2 slots in mainstream motherboards.
- wtallis 10mo agoThree is not pitiful. Three is plenty for mainstream use cases, which is what mainstream motherboards are designed for.
- ComputerGuru 10mo agoWe 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.
- tart-lemonade 10mo agoI 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.
- crote 10mo agoThe 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 boot drive for some VM host?
- nemomarx 10mo agoWhere 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
- esseph 10mo agoPCIE expansion card with m2 slots? (SSDs are "fine", just playing devil's advocate.)
- paulbgd 10mo agopcie expansion cards? SATA isn’t free and takes away from having potentially more PCIE lanes, so the only real difference here is the connector
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- crote 10mo agoCounterpoint: who needs that much fast storage? 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. Pre-hype, for bulk storage SSDs are around $70/TB, whereas spinning drives are around $17/TB. Are you really willing to pay that much more for slightly higher speeds on that once-per-month access to archived data? 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.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 10mo agoIf 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.
- iooi 10mo agoSATA, not NVMe, they will still be making SSDs.
- tracker1 10mo agothere are more non-crucial suppliers of Micron based ram than Crucial... they can pick up the slack... Micron simply wanted to redirect resources to supporting larger contracts to other suppliers over direct consumer support. The market isn't shrinking as a result. I would suspect the same with Samsung exiting SATA (not NVME) drives... their chips are likely to be used by other MFGs, but even then maybe not as SATA is much slower than what most solid state memory and controllers are capable of supporting. There's also a massive low-end market of competition for SATA SSDs and Samsung sales are likely not the best overall.
- esjeon 10mo agoIt’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. :/
- jajuuka 10mo agoSATA 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.
- foxrider 10mo agoSATA 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.
- vachina 10mo agoSATA SSD has a huge heatsink attached to it. It is crucial for 24/7 use. NVME needs active cooling to survive.
- wtallis 10mo agoLots of consumer SATA SSDs don't have any 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. 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. 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.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoWhat 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.
- throwaway94275 10mo agoPCIe 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.
- tracker1 10mo agoAgreed... 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.
- wtallis 10mo agoConsumer 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 great 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. 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.
- dangus 10mo ago> I don't want to be forced to have my spinning platters connected via NVMe and a series of connector adapters. I want to build a mini PC-based 3D printed NAS box with a SATA backplate with that exact NVME connector adapter setup! https://makerworld.com/en/models/1644686-n5-mini-a-3d-printed-5-bay-nas-175x175mm https://makerworld.com/en/models/1644686-n5-mini-a-3d-printe... The reality is, as long as you have PCIe you can do pretty much whatever you want, and it's not a big deal.
- gary_0 10mo agoI 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.)
- zamadatix 10mo agoIf 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 the above one way or the other though.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo agoI 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.
- wtallis 10mo ago> 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. 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.
- zamadatix 10mo agoKeep 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.
- up2isomorphism 10mo agoPeople are at same time complaining about data slow but they seem to happily paying AWS 10x for less iops and bandwidth.
- fckgw 10mo agoWhat does this have to do with consumer SATA SSDs?
- alsetmusic 10mo agoI'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.
- zamadatix 10mo agoAnything exciting has been in NVMe over various physical form factors for the last decade, discontinuing SATA only helps in the future anticipation regard.
- pjdesno 10mo agoThe 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.
- pdimitar 10mo agoI agree hobbyist NAS is niche but it's very useful: less noise, less electricity bills, and not that much less space i.e. if you can find 3x Samsung 870 QVO drives at 8TB, you can have a super solid 16TB NAS with redundancy (or 24TB without). Not to mention compact; you can have an ITX-sized PC do quite a lot of work.
- gsibble 10mo agoProbably 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.
- vondur 10mo agoI have some older SATA SSD's in my PC currently. I'd not buy a new one, too slow compared to NVME.
- ZyanWu 10mo agoTechradar article may be fake or a rumor https://wccftech.com/no-samsung-isnt-phasing-out-of-the-consumer-ssd-business/ https://wccftech.com/no-samsung-isnt-phasing-out-of-the-cons...