Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

https://www.techradar.com/computing/storage-backup/looking-for-a-cheap-ssd-dont-wait-samsung-could-stop-producing-budget-models-soon

by Krontab • 7 months ago

109 114 7 months ago

techradar.com

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266070

xyse53• 7 months ago

I'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• 7 months ago

When 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.

tracker110• 7 months ago

Probably because QNAP and Synology pricing is rent seeking behavior on per drive bay pricing models.

poly2it2• 7 months ago

How 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.

wtallis13• 7 months ago

Can you point to a specific motherboard? 16 separate PCIe links of any width sounds rather high for a consumer platform.

toast02• 7 months ago

The 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.

crote4• 7 months ago

I 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• 7 months ago

It 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_d62• 7 months ago

Its 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.

zamadatix7• 7 months ago

I've been doing my home NASes in m.2 NVMe for years now with 12 disks on one and 22 disks on another (backup still HDD though):

DWPD: Between the random teamgroup drives in the main NAS and WD Red Pro HDDs in the backup, the write limits are actually about the same. With the bonus reads are infinite on the SSDs, so things like scheduled ZFS scrubs don't count as 100 TB of usage across the pool each time.

Heat: Actually easier to manage than the HDDs. The drives are smaller (so denser for the same wattage) but the peak wattage is lower than the idle spinning wattage of the HDDs and there isn't a large physical buffer between the hot parts and the airflow. My normal case airflow keeps them at <60C under sustained benching of all of the drives raw, and more like <40 C given ZFS doesn't like to go more than 8 GB/s in this setup anyways. If you select $600 top end SSDs with high wattage controllers shipping with heatsinks you might have more of a problem, otherwise it's like 100 W max for the 22 drives and easy enough to cool.

PLP: More problematic if this is part of your use case, as NVMe drives with PLP will typically lead you straight into enterprise pricing. Personally my use case is more "on demand large file access" with extremely low churn data regularly backed up for the long term and I'm not at a loss if I have an issue and need to roll back to yesterday's data, but others who use things more as an active drive may have different considerations.

The biggest downsides I ran across were:

- Loading up all of the lanes on a modern consumer board works in theory, can be buggy as hell in practice. Anything from the boot becoming EXTREMELY long to just not working at all sometimes to PCIe errors during operation. Used Epyc in a normal PC case is the way to go instead.

- It costs more, obviously

- Not using a chassis designed for massive numbers of drives with hot-swap access can be quite the pain to troubleshoot install for.

The biggest upsides (other than the obvious ones) I ran across were:

- No spinup drain on the PSU

- No need to worry about drive powersaving/idling <- pairs with -> whole solution is quiet enough to sit in my living room without hearing drive whine.

- I don't look like a struggling fool trying to move a full chassis around :)

nonameiguess• 7 months ago

I 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.

wtallis13• 7 months ago

Are 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• 7 months ago

If you want to go big in capacity, which is something you usually want for NAS, m.2 becomes super expensive.

zb32• 7 months ago

Fsck this cartel.. I hope China will fill these gaps and help restore normal prices.

Flavius• 7 months ago

You will be down-voted to hell for this comment, but luckily their down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...

Analemma_• 7 months ago

He'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).

cheema33• 7 months 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.

vachina2• 7 months ago

China has also wisened up and is limiting supplies also. Their B2C marketplace is seeing less and less >1TB SSDs and even those who sell I've seen prices x2 in the span of two months.

kasabali3• 7 months ago

They aren't limiting supplies, they can't scale up the production: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/chinas-chip...

Neil44• 7 months ago

Samsung 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• 7 months ago

Does 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?

barrkel2• 7 months ago

It'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.

zamadatix7• 7 months ago

NVMe via m.2 remains more than fine for covering the consumer SSD use cases.

Aurornis2• 7 months ago

The first NVMe over PCIe consumer drive was launched a decade ago.

It's hard to even find new PC builds using SATA drives.

SATA was phased out many years ago. The primary market for SATA SSDs is upgrading old systems or maybe the absolute lowest cost system integrators at this point, but it's a dwindling market.

0manrho• 7 months ago

SATA just needs to be retired. It's already been replaced, we don't need Yet Another Storage Interface. Considering consumer IO-Chipsets are already implemented in such a way that they take 4 (or generally, a few) upstream lanes of $CurrentGenPCIe to the CPU, and bifurcating/multiplexing it out (providing USB, SATA, NVMe, etc I/O), we should just remove the SATA cost/manufacturing overhead entirely, and focusing on keeping the cost of keeping that PCIe switching/chipset down for consumers (and stop double-stacking chipsets AMD, motherboards are pricey enough). Or even just integrating better bifurcation support on the CPU's themselves as some already support it (typically via converting x16 on the "top"/"first" PCIe slot to x4/x4/x4/x4).

Going forward, SAS should just replace SATA where NVMe PCIe is for some reason a problem (eg price), even on the consumer side, as it would still support existing legacy SATA devices.

Storage related interfaces (I'm aware there's some overlap here, but point is, there's already plenty of options, and lots of nuances to deal with already, let's not add to it without good reason):

- NVMe PCIe

- M.2 and all of it's keys/lengths/clearances

- U.2 (SFF-8639) and U.3 (SFF-TA-1001)

- EDSFF (which is a very large family of things)

- FibreChannel

- SAS and all of it's permutations

- Oculink

- MCIO

- Let's not forget USB4/Thunderbolt supporting Tunnelling of PCIe

Obligatory: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png

tart-lemonade• 7 months ago

I 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.

crote4• 7 months ago

The 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• 7 months ago

Where 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

gotodengo• 7 months ago

Cheaper, sturdier, and more easily swappable than NVME while still being far faster than spinning discs. I use them basically as independent cartridges, this one's work, that one's a couple TB of raw video files plus the associated editor project, that one has games and movies. I can confidently travel with 3-4 unprotected in my bag.

There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.

pjdesno4• 7 months ago

Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?

Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche.

I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be replaced without opening the machine, too, which is a major win - every time you pull the machine out on its rails and pop the top is another opportunity for cables to come out or other things to go wrong.

ls612• 7 months ago

I bought 2 of the 870 QVOs a few years ago and put them in software RAID 0 for my steam library. They cost significantly less per TB than the M.2 drives at the time.

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 7 months ago

If 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• 7 months ago

SATA, not NVMe, they will still be making SSDs.

tracker110• 7 months ago

there 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• 7 months ago

It’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• 7 months ago

SATA 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• 7 months ago

SATA 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.

pjdesno4• 7 months ago

No advantage over SAS here - it's the same form factor.

vachina2• 7 months ago

SATA SSD has a huge heatsink attached to it. It is crucial for 24/7 use. NVME needs active cooling to survive.

wtallis13• 7 months ago

Lots 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.

Marsymars• 7 months ago

Are any SATA SSDs actually built to sink heat into the enclosure? e.g. The 860 Pro released in 2018 has a PCB taking up a third of plastic enclosure with no heatsinks to speak of: https://www.myfixguide.com/samsung-860-pro-ssd-teardown/

And even in worst-case hammering of drives, thermally throttled NVMEs can still sustain higher speeds than SATA drives.

1970-01-01• 7 months ago

What 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• 7 months ago

PCIe 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.

tracker110• 7 months ago

Agreed... 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.

wtallis13• 7 months ago

Consumer 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• 7 months 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-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.

justsomehnguy4• 7 months ago

I don't want to be forced to have my spinning platters connected via NVM

It's called a PCIe disk controller and you just accustomized to have one built-in in the south bridge.

gary_0• 7 months ago

I 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.)

zamadatix7• 7 months ago

If 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• 7 months 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.

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.

tracker110• 7 months ago

I remember running my first NVME drive via a PCIe adapter on my i7 4790K about a decade ago... man, that was a game changer for sure, almost as much as going from HDD to SSD on SATA around 2009.

zokier2• 7 months ago

On the other hand nvme has been around for >10 years (since z97 from 2014 I guess).

up2isomorphism• 7 months ago

People are at same time complaining about data slow but they seem to happily paying AWS 10x for less iops and bandwidth.

fckgw• 7 months ago

What does this have to do with consumer SATA SSDs?

alsetmusic• 7 months ago

I'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.

zamadatix7• 7 months ago

Anything exciting has been in NVMe over various physical form factors for the last decade, discontinuing SATA only helps in the future anticipation regard.

pjdesno4• 7 months ago

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.

pdimitar3• 7 months ago

I 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• 7 months ago

Probably 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• 7 months ago

I have some older SATA SSD's in my PC currently. I'd not buy a new one, too slow compared to NVME.

ZyanWu• 7 months ago

Techradar article may be fake or a rumor

https://wccftech.com/no-samsung-isnt-phasing-out-of-the-cons...

Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon

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