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/vid

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.