PCIe SSDs Increasing in Demand, Overtaking SATA Solutions in 2019

[Raevenlord]

DigiTimes, citing industry sources, has reported that PCIe-based SSDs will be overtaking SATA-based solutions during 2019. This makes sense in a number of ways: the smaller footprint for Pcie-based, M.2 SSDs means they are prone to higher adoption form laptop manufacturers tan their SATA counterparts. On the desktop and DIY side of things, SATA solutions have sometimes been preferred to their PCIe counterparts mostly due to the pricing delta between solutions across those form factors.

However, as NAND prices have declined precipitously, and PCIe controllers' pricing has done so too, we are now hitting a point where the cost strain on SATA's additional materials compared to their PCIe counterparts leaves the delta so small that it doesn't make any sense to purchase a SATA-limited drive (usually limited only by the speed of the SATA III interface itself) instead of a PCIe-based one. AS demand picks up some additional 20-25% for 2019, this will mostly be taken up by PCIe-based solutions. Pricing of a 512 GB PCIe storage device is now comparable to that of a 256 GB unit just a year ago. Pricing is expected to keep falling for the duration of this year.



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[blobster21]

In the meantime, i have 6 SATA 6G connectors and only one M2 slot, all of them are populated.

Give me 6 M2 slots on any given motherboard and let's talk about this smaller footprint again.

 

[hat]

In the meantime, i have 6 SATA 6G connectors and only one M2 slot, all of them are populated.

Give me 6 M2 slots on any given motherboard and let's talk about this smaller footprint again.

With that many drives, I'm thinking a PCI-E expansion card with m.2 slots would be in order. Or just straight PCI-E SSDs, but then you have a bunch of storage drives taking up space around your other PCI-E devices. Or, with storage needs that great, spinners are still king, unless you need a ton of storage that is also lightning fast.

 

[Zubasa]

In the meantime, i have 6 SATA 6G connectors and only one M2 slot, all of them are populated.

Give me 6 M2 slots on any given motherboard and let's talk about this smaller footprint again.

Each lane is up to PCI-E x4, so 6 of those would require 24 lanes on their own, and on top of that there would be at least one 16x slot on the board.
That is a total of 40 lanes of PCI-E before any thing else.
For that, you need a Threadripper / Skylake-X to even have that many PCI-E lanes, and Intel used to segment the X299 with cheaper CPUs offering only 28 lanes.

 

[SLA1N]

I went from thinking m2 slots were wasted space to now wishing I had as many nvme connectors as I do sata ports. I’d like to see a board with m2 nvme connectors even it it has a riser.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Those ultra greedy CPU/Mobo makers need to start providing more PCI-E lines for their products....

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

Instead of increasing PCIe lane, providing newer/better version of PCIe could become the norm. Doesn't PCIe bandwidth double every generation. So instead of one PCIe 3.0 x4 (looking at you Ryzen), they could provide two PCIe 4.0 x2. Or is that how it doesn't work?

 

[Jism]

You cant saturate any system with just NVME disks only. But it'll be in the form of a addon-card or something like that. NVME is really really fast compared to traditional S-ata but as a daily user with light / medium tasks and some games, there's not much difference in between the two platforms. It starts to count when you start pushing large datasets where the difference of 600MB read speeds vs 3000MB read speeds really takes into account.

I have'nt had one application or game that was able to saturate the 970 Evo with a consistent 3GB read speed. It's more like you can do a 10 things at the same time before your even at the limit of the NVME.

 

[TheOne]

Not surprising with the price on PCIe M.2 drives coming down, last month Newegg had the 500GB WD Black (2018) on sale for $80.

 

[Kapone33]

This article in no way surprises me. I git a 1TB ADATA SX8200 NVME drive for $199 which is about the same as a good 1 TB SSD in terms of cost. The other thing is that you can get M2 riser cards relatively inexpensive vs a 2 or 3 SSD RAID adapter.

 

[EarthDog]

prone to higher adoption form laptop manufacturers tan their SATA counterparts.

What is tan?

 

[HTC]

What is tan?

I believe it's a small typo: it's supposed to be "than".

That's what makes sense in that phrase, IMO.