SATA 4 upgrade soon?

[Morgana]

We have upgraded to Nvme gen 4 as recently as 1 year ago with Intel cpus and chipsets, so why hasn't anybody talked about upgrading the sata ports on the motherboard to a new "sata 4" version?

[Blue4130]

6 minutes ago, Morgana said:

We have upgraded to Nvme gen 4 as recently as 1 year ago with Intel cpus and chipsets, so why hasn't anybody talked about upgrading the sata ports on the motherboard to a new "sata 4" version?

Because it isn't needed. NVME/PCI-e took over for SSD's and HDD's don't come close to saturating current SATA speeds.

[mariushm]

It's not gonna happen.

 

There was that SATA Express that Intel promoted (sata/pci-e mix) but didn't really catch on. Now they're doing U.2 which has 4 pci-e lanes and also includes 12v to power the drives : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.2

 

Personally I'd like to see them decide on just ONE pci-e lane per device. giving you 985 MB/s for pci-e 3.0 or 1800 MB/s for pci-e 4.0 , overkill for mechanical drives. 

Would make it easy for multiple manufacturers to produce pci-e switches and bring the prices down .. ex have the budget boards use 1 pci-e 4.0 in,  8 pci-e 2.0 x1 lanes out ... you have 8 drives connected at max 500 MB/s ...  or pci-e 4.0 x4 -> 8 pci-e 3.0 x1

have the drives put a controller on them to talk through pci-e instead of sata... not expensive when you sell millions of mechanical drives.

 

[SupaKomputa]

There is no SATA version 4 that i know of, there is some revision to the 3rd version but it is minor according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA.

[Doobeedoo]

Nah probably dead though. Really in enterprise is where I see HDDs being used from now on mostly. Also there's SAS that's being used there too. In mainstream I can see it kept for a while like older USB but yeah.

[Lightwreather]

Also, iirc, HDDs are also probably going to move over to NVMe 2.0

if they ever manage to reach the 3gb/s max of sata 3

[mariushm]

Well, it wouldn't be far fetched for a hard drive manufacturer to add 256-512 GB of memory as a write cache , in front of a 24+ TB mechanical drive... and then it would be justified to have gigabytes / second write speeds for short bursts of writes, and then fall down to mechanical drive speeds which are in the 260..100 MB/s speeds ... funny enough fairly close to QLC speeds which are at around 350 MB/s at the lowest, even some TLC drives have speeds in the 300 MB/s after the SLC cache is filled.

 

WD has already started using flash memory to move all the information that's not actual user data from the platters, in order to store user data more densely. We're talking about format information, platter health information, what bad sectors are present from factory and masked/hidden from user and so on

 

See : Western Digital Reimagines HDD - Flash Integration with OptiNAND

 

It wouldn't surprise me if they expand that and add more flash memory for read/write caches, especially if they choose to go with shingled recording which is slow at writes.

[ewitte]

The new NVME spec allows NVME hard drives no use updating SATA.