Why have SATA SSD improvements stalled?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Morgan Simmons

Active Member
Feb 18, 2015
134
25
28
44
Hi Everyone...

It's just a thought that has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Sequential Speeds obviously have saturated the bus at this point in time, but I'm wondering why we havnen't seen random read / write operations getting closer to saturating the bus.

It seems to me that is a much more important metric than the sequential speeds, and since NVME can easily be faster in those departments, why hasn't that trickled down to SATA drives.

I'd love to see a drive where both the sequential and random io were both capable of saturating the bus when needed. That would make my fully sata / sas investment last several years longer than changing everything out for nvme access.

What do you all think?

Thanks, and Happy Holidays
Marshall
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
113
SATA III is too slow for modern SSD designs. Not enough throughput and higher latency versus NVMe. The Intel DC S3710 was released in Jan 2015 and after almost two years it still remains one of the best performing SATA SSDs around. That is not a coincidence. We already highlighted the focus shifting to NVMe NVMe Falling Below SATA Pricing? Get ready it is happening

With that said, the NAND shortage is really bad. I have talked to several vendors now saying Q3 2017 is when we will see things get better. That is propping all SSD prices up.

I think the better way to look at it is that you are going to keep your SATA/ SAS SSD systems but starting with Purley (E5 V5) you will be looking NVMe.