Is SATA Obsolete?

Is the SATA interface for hard drives and SSDs on its way out, or is it going to hang on for a long time to come?

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[weirdguybr]

PATA went away not because of SSDs (it took them *years* to become cheap and common enough to justify any industry-wide changes) - it went away because every hard drive manufacturer moved to SATA, as it's a cheaper standard to implement, had better performance than PATA and was easier for users to deal with (fewer pins to bend and also no jumpers to set the drive role in the "chain"). It also had massive implications on the SMB server business, since you suddenly could manufacture cheaper servers using SATA instead of SCSI and fit a lot more disks per chassis with somewhat decent performance. This is exactly the same reason that not long after, SCSI went away and got replaced by SAS, also known as Serial Attached SCSI.

[CattoRayTube]

I recall SATA becoming dominant a good decade before SSDs started becoming standard into non-enthusiast system.

[thestig]

Most motherboards only have 1 or 2 NVMe slots, but many more Sata ports. SATA is here to stay for now just for the ability to add more storage drives.

[SoulRipper]

Another Reason SATA is super valuable is that PC's as old as 20 years do have sata ports. And you can literally breate life into old pc's(atleast 10 years old) just by swapping the HDD with an SSD

[AttilaSVK]

Some fun facts:
1) SATA has been around for 19 years, while the lifespan of PATA was about 22 years (first drives started shipping in 1986 and by 2008 SATA took over about 99% of the market).
2) The original speed of PATA was 8, 3MB/s and was bumped up to 33, 66, 100 and 133MB/s during its lifetime. That's a 16x increase. SATA's transfer speed increase so far is only 4x. (theoretically, if we consider the latest SAS-4 standard, we could stretch it to 16x, as it uses the same cable, but otherwise no SATA drives will benefit from such a fast SAS controller, and SAS drives won't be recognized by a SATA controller)

[Bayofthest]

Meanwhile my 10 years old 3.5 HDD still kicking for storing my entire..uh..memorial homework and college subjects..

[EpicB]

Even if SSDs take over for day to day use I don't think old school SATA hard drives will be going away anytime soon, simply because they're still cheaper for bulk storage.

[Great.Milenko]

its still a cheap easy standard which is more than enough for most users, maybe not so much for tech enthusiasts. but for 99% of people its easily fast enough.

[VirtuallyGreen]

Secondary NVME drive slots usually connect to the chipset and not use the pcie lanes for the CPU. There are some exceptions with motherboards, which allocate x8 lanes to the NVME drives, but usually you are not giving up GPU lanes for additional NVME drives.

[smakfu]

Let’s get the history correct here: SATA replaced ATA-5/6, it was only called parallel ATA posthumously. Even the term ATA, or AT attached storage, wasn’t used much, as everyone just called them IDE drives. PATA was never a standard: the 40 pin ATA cable, and the various PIO and UDMA modes were standards that rode over the basic ATA interface. An interface which started life as nothing more than an arbitrated bridge interface to the 16 bit IBM PC AT ISA bus (thus the name AT-attachment interface), as the core drive controller was located on the drives logic board (thus the name IDE, for integrated drive electronics).

[raymondtrabulsy]

I remember the first time I saw a computer with an SSD. It's boot up time blew my mind.

[johndoh]

PATA died to SATA. Not anything else. SATA is much easier to deal with in many ways. The mechanical drives are the same. Only difference is the controller and the cables. PATA cables were thick ribbon cables and a PATA connection was limited to 2 drives, which needed jumpers set. In the space of a single PATA port on a MB, you get 6 SATA ports. There were usually 2 PATA ports, for a total of 4 drives. Moving to SATA allowed the space for ports to be cut in half on the MB, along with adding 2 more mechanical drives to the system, and then some MBs added 2 more SATA ports for a total of 8.

It's kind of like saying a MB got faded away because of newer MBs. It's true, but you still have a MB.

Many home systems don't need mechanical drives anymore. They've moved to large volume data storage, and for that they're still king. With 20TB drives now, 4 SATA ports give 80TB of storage. Somehow I don't see that being economical for a home user within the next 10 years if you move that to NVMe, that is 80TB of storage.

I don't see SATA ports going away anytime soon.


And, let's remember that the typical NVMe drive isn't really accessible. It sits between the GPU and CPU, or is under the GPU. This means you typically have to take off a CPU cooler to get to it, or remove the GPU, or both.

[Xylight]

Sata will not die, just like HDDs still haven't completely died

[ADDY]

No. SATA is alive and kicking. Just because you can afford an NVME doesn't mean everyone in this world can.

[diyi]

Been awhile since a video hit 100% for me. I think SATA is one of those standards that has earned a permanent place in computing. It links legacy with constant future upgrades. My main laptop came with one 500gb m. 2 nvme stick, one empty m. 2 slot AND a 2.5 SATA bay😁. I slapped another 500gb nvme stick and a 1tb 2.5 in that sucker. I now can store everything from three previous household computer onto one laptop, keeping everything nice and separated 😌. Sometimes, it's just the simple things...

[sonicjhiq]

Also Sata is used for those rare people (me included) who still have an optical disc drive in their PC

[rjhornsby]

SATA was around long before SSD went mass market. Solid state didn’t kill IDE/PATA. Serial is cheaper, smaller, and less complex than parallel links. Bus timing is easier to deal with, so optimizing for speed is easier. I’ve become the “back in my day” old guy on the internet. Thanks for that, TechQuickie.

[Ivan-prku]

The SATA interface is simply serialized ATA protocol, similar to how PCI-Express carries over the legacy PCI signaling. SATA's only functional advantage is that it was able to transmit the data packets faster, but it carried over all the limitations of the old standard, like half-duplex transmission (only read or write operation at a time) and very short command queue, limiting the number of concurrent requests. All this was naturally limits the highly parallel nature of the NAND memory, but for the most users it will be good enough for many more years.

[ChaotiX]

orignal SATA came out in 03/04 and offered 1.5Gbps, SATA II was introduced in 2007 with 3Gbps and SATA III debuted in 2010 sporting 6Gbps. By that pattern, one could guess that we would have been on at least SATA V running at 24Gbps bandwith speeds.
But no.
Its been 15 years and we are still stuck on sata 3 with no updates on the standard being developed further. Its like companies said "yeah thats good enough" and just gave up on it. Im very sad to see this interface be left to slowly die from neglect.

[Morrow]

3:53 A beautiful way to install an HDD. I do mine this way.