Sata and USB merge? Why not???

[smeezer]

Question: Why isn't anyone talking about merging SATA and USB? Considering that the number of pins required for SATA power and data is less than USB C for example and the data capabilities of newer USB standards could do it, why not do away with mobo SATA connectors and replace them with USB headers.  Still have an old SATA device? No problem, plug a SATA adapter onto a horizontal locking USB header.  Don't use SATA at all? Great now you have a ton of USB headers.  I know I definitely need more USB headers on my mobo than SATA.  Why is this not a thing already? Slimline SATA power only provides 5v.  Maybe the current implementations of USB wouldn't be able to do it, but I think say USB 3.3 that would be a really good idea. I'm sure there are technical hurdles that would need addressing but I'm sure it's doable.

[AshleyAshes]

Holy god no... Just no.

[NumLock21]

They had it a long time ago before usb 3 existed. It was only found on laptops, it was a combo of eSATA and USB. A single port that can take eSATA or USB devices. When USB 3 arrived, eSATA/usb combo almost disappeared overnight. eSATA never has its own power and always rely on a external power brick. This is when they decided to add USB cause usb provides power. This combo port can also powered eSATA where it can provide up to 12v of power.

 

For USB there is also ones provides a lot more power than the typical 5v. Here is one provides 12v and 24v. Greens are 12v and red is 24v.

 

 

 

[smeezer]

@NumLock21 That's really cool. I personally despise and completely avoid laptops and don't follow them so I wasn't aware this existed. I wonder what killed it. I'm gonna have to do some googling.

[NumLock21]

1 hour ago, smeezer said:

@NumLock21 That's really cool. I personally despise and completely avoid laptops and don't follow them so I wasn't aware this existed. I wonder what killed it. I'm gonna have to do some googling.

The reason they got killed off is, eSATA wasn't that popular and they were expensive. The other reason was the lack of power and ease of use. When eSATA first arrived, it was an alternative to having the same drive performance as a internal drive but it's external. During that time, fastest port was USB 2.0. USB 2.0 was only rated at 480Mb/s while eSATA has a rating of 3Gb/s. While fast, the problem was how it needs to be configured. A usb flash drive when you plugged it into a USB port windows detects and in a few moments, that usb drive is ready for use. eSATA on the other hand does not work like this. First they cannot be plugged in while the system is on, your system must be off. 2nd they don't have power, so you will need a external power brick, no matter the physical size of that drive. Imagine a eSATA flash drive, the same physical dimensions as the USB flash drive you have, and it requires a laptop style charger just to power that puny device, it's stupid. 3rd thing is, they cannot be unplugged while the machine is on. Need to unplug the drive, then you have to turn off the machine first, before it can be unplugged. If eSATA requires these steps to operate properly just exactly like a internal drive, then what was the point of eSATA anyway? Later on they came out with eSATA with power, which is where that eSATA+USB combo came from, but it was too late as eSATA left a bad taste for some people, so no one bother with eSATA anymore, cause many would rather deal with the slow and user friendly USB 2.0 rather than the complex fast eSATA. eSATA's final nail in the coffin was the introducing of USB 3.0. Faster than eSATA at 5Gb/s, no external power brick required, no need to power one or off, just to remove and insert the drive.

[smeezer]

@NumLock21 but imagine USB 3.x having sata and sata power built in with hotplug... I think it would be sick and super flexible too bad that'll likely never happen. I'd really love to see the decline of sata ports on enthusiast boards. Such a waste.  PCIE NVME or bust

[AshleyAshes]

5 hours ago, smeezer said:

I'd really love to see the decline of sata ports on enthusiast boards. Such a waste.

"Dear enthusiasts, we understand that a bunch of you like streaming and recording your own gameplay to your hard drives.  However we removed your SATA controller to make Smeezer happy, so you'll either have to store that footage on a your NVME, to a NAS, or buy a PCIE SATA controller, cause those little ports on the mobo just annoyed Smeezer so much."

[smeezer]

Dear Enthusiasts, we understand that being able to choose how your computer uses it's resources more effectively makes you happy. So, we've integrated sata with USB so that if you want to use slow, antiquated technology, you can but with the flexibility of an updated connector and technology so that if you have embraced modern storage systems, you can still find a use for the ports we've populated your motherboard with.  Can't afford enthusiast grade storage? No problem, simply use an dongle to adapt your existing Sata drives to USB just like people used to do to connect their equally obsolete IDE drives to Sata when it was orginally introduced.

 

[AshleyAshes]

2 minutes ago, smeezer said:

No problem, simply use an dongle to adapt your existing Sata drives to USB just like people used to do to connect their equally obsolete IDE drives to Sata when it was orginally introduced.

...So... You have no comprehension of the additional CPU load and other costs that come with using a USB to SATA bridge, do you?  Not to mention the inherent inefficiencies of the USB Mass Storage protocol...?

 

Like, I get it, you think that you can just 'adapt that' so you think it should all be USB, but, well, no.

[smeezer]

I threw usb out there more as a "something else useful" more than BY GOLLY I DEMAND USB. I did learn some interesting things in the process but by no means do I specifically pin my hopes and dreams on usb & sata integration.  I can see how the original post might have given that impression though. I mean, really it could be anything that would allow backwards compatibility but still be useful to people who have moved on to modern storage standards. Preferably something that is gaining popularity and usefulness rather than stagnating.

[smeezer]

By all means though, I'm always ready to learn more, please elaborate on the typical cpu utilization of both standards and the inherent inefficiencies of usb mass storage Oh, to clarify, please explain how using sata protocol over usb would invoke the usb mass storage protocol (if it was fully integrated)

[AshleyAshes]

23 minutes ago, smeezer said:

people who have moved on to modern storage standards. Preferably something that is gaining popularity and usefulness rather than stagnating.

I find this language pretty entertaining.  Look, I get it, you're young, so you think that everything new and shiney i the must have.  But it's a pretty childish perspective.  So let's go over some things:

 

Firstly, SATA is modern, it's just not the newest 'cool thing'.  Large mechanical hard drives are not going anywhere and they currently show no sign if disappearing.  As it stands the largest SSDs (Even those using SATA) available as consumer products only reach 4TB and they cost $1500USD or more.  ...Most consumers don't buy SSDs larger than 1TB for this reason.

 

Secondly, NVME has some serious downsides.  Most critically is the number of PCIE lanes it consumes.  4 PCIE Lanes per NVME drive is a lot.  Installing multiple NVME drives into a consumer system hits a wall PRETTY quickly.  Before you say 'Oh, well, they can just add more PCIE lanes!', no, complicated that's an engineering effort and it will make CPUs and chipsets more expensive.  But in short, the PCIE lane consumption of NVME is a liability.  But in short, one isn't going to get a lot of room for their entire Steam library on NVME unless they pay through the nose.  An 8700K only has 16 lanes, all of which normally go to the GPU so they're out, and a Z370 chipset only has 24 lanes.  That's a maximum of only 6 NVME drives and that's NOTHING else in the chipset is using all PCIE lanes.  ...Oh and you won't have 24 PCIE lanes.  Because all those extra components on a motherboard?  Sound?  Additional USB controller?  Anything else that isn't built into the chipset?  They are on internal PCIE connections and using lanes.  So LESS than 6 drives is your maximum.

 

Let's use my media server for example, it spins mechanical drives except for one OS SSD and all are on SATA.  All 14 drives are using up only THREE PCIE lanes.  One lane for the Intel controller in the board one more each for the PCIE 1x 4 port SATA controllers.

 

NVME is a HOG.  Is it fast?  Yes,  But it demands a LOT of resources from the motherboard in both PCIE lanes and physical space on the board.  So it's pretty childish to call it 'Modern' and anything else 'Antiquated'.  It's just protocols that are more ideally suitable to different tasks and have different considerations to weigh for either.

[AshleyAshes]

10 minutes ago, smeezer said:

By all means though, I'm always ready to learn more, please elaborate on the typical cpu utilization of both standards and the inherent inefficiencies of usb mass storage

In short, everything over USB basically has to go through the CPU.  Relatively speaking, USB mass storage requires significantly more CPU resources than SATA.  USB is, relatively speaking, exceptionally inefficient.  That's the trade off you get for USB's 'Universal' business.  But uninformed lay users are likely to not understand this and see USB only as a magic port that anything plugs into and works.

[smeezer]

I thought we were talking enthusiast grade, not mainstream so I don't think the "most consumers" argument applies anyway... Imagine if you could just put 4 nvme drives on an adapter card and put it in a x16 slot and have a cpu that had more than your imaginary limit of 16 pcie lanes... Imagine if there was even a motherboard that could be configured to accept that configuration, whoah. But you're the "expert" so I must have my facts wrong because obviously more than 16 pcie lanes on a cpu would be too difficult to bother with the extra "engineering effort."

ATA was mainstream give or take for 11 years, Sata has been mainstream for 13.  Yes, it's old. Sata 3 is 9 years old.  Imagine running a 9 year old graphics card. lol
Nvme isn't just the shiny new cool toy.  It's the beginning of the end for sata.  I'm so young that I remember when EIDE was released, but I get it, you're old so you forget things like how originally you could only have 2 ATA drives connected to your motherboard.  I think that's all the "experts" imagined people could afford or even be able to use. 
But I'm just a layperson, what do I know *shrug*
Regarding your second comment about USB, you should note that my original post was talking about the idea of *future* usb standards and implementations.  Again, simply using USB ports as an example for potential replacements for sata ports.  Obviously, the existing method doesn't work, and wouldn't be efficient.  There are less well known standards out there that do allow for better mass storage over USB than the protocol you're referring to.  I suspect it wouldn't be impossible to rework USB to find a more efficient way to provide support for it than currently exists but that's mostly irrelevant since that wasn't the real point.
 

Edited January 23, 2018 by smeezer
Removed relevant video but it was breaking TOS technically

[smeezer]

That's not even taking into account that PCIE 4 is pretty much here although with PCIE 5 around the corner I doubt we're going to see a lot of PCIE 4.  Considering that pcie 4 is double pcie 3 and pcie 5 is double pcie 4, odds are good that a current NVME drive is only going to need 1 pxie lane at pcie 5 so ultimately that "hog" point is moot.

[SpencerC]

10 minutes ago, smeezer said:

That's not even taking into account that PCIE 4 is pretty much here although with PCIE 5 around the corner I doubt we're going to see a lot of PCIE 4.  Considering that pcie 4 is double pcie 3 and pcie 5 is double pcie 4, odds are good that a current NVME drive is only going to need 1 pxie lane at pcie 5 so ultimately that "hog" point is moot.

Except none of that exists right now. PCIE Gen 3 is the standard, and as such NVME storage is quite a hog of resources. As Ashley Ashes pointed out SATA is far from "outdated". USB storage is convenient, but inherently flawed due to its limitations. Thunderbolt is the closest thing to a "universal" port that we have.

[SpencerC]

Also, the PCIE lanes limitation Ashley brought up isn't imaginary. It is indeed quite real. For all the 8700k is, it isn't great on PCIE lanes count at all.

[smeezer]

@SpencerC PCIE 4 is already released as a standard and 5 is in 2019.  It's still only a footnote to the fact that both intel and amd have hedt solutions that allow for plenty of PCIE NVME drives and lanes for "other" features.  Once again, usb wasn't the the point, it was an example. Substitute thunderbolt, substitute whatever you want. The point is Sata is a one-trick old pony that needs to give up and start going away.

[smeezer]

@SpencerC 16 pcie lane limit IS imaginary.  Seriously, completely imaginary. You know that the 8700K isn't the only CPU on the market, right?

[SpencerC]

10 minutes ago, smeezer said:

@SpencerC 16 pcie lane limit IS imaginary.  Seriously, completely imaginary. You know that the 8700K isn't the only CPU on the market, right?

Yes, I know that. Considering that Intel comprises the majority of the market, however, the limitation on PCIE lanes is still very real. I don't understand where your logic lies that PCIE lanes on consumer platforms "doesn't exist". PCIE Gen 3 is still the standard on both consumer and enterprise hardware until we actually see viable products with Gen4 or Gen5. And since you brought it up, yes, the HEDT platforms done by Intel and AMD allow for copious amounts of PCIE lanes (more so for AMD, as they have 64 lanes). Even with all these lanes, the maximum amount of NVME storage you can use is 11 on X399, and 7 on X299. This is a large amount, granted, but SATA can provide far more storage while costing less and still being quite speedy. SATA is not "a one trick pony" that needs to die. SATA is merely a means of providing mass storage at a cheap price while still not being a real bottleneck to 95% of the population. Accept that SATA isn't going anywhere anytime soon and move on. For Pete's sake, this is like arguing that the ATX standard needs to die because it's "from the 90's".

[tikker]

18 minutes ago, smeezer said:

@SpencerC 16 pcie lane limit IS imaginary.  Seriously, completely imaginary. You know that the 8700K isn't the only CPU on the market, right?

You also realize that not everyone can afford an 8700k right?

If more pcie lanes means more expensive CPU, while technologically the limit of 16 is perhaps not the true limit, realistically for many people it is.

 

Personally I don't really see the point in merging everything into one connector. I like the bottom-up approach, KISS and have components do what they are good at. There's no need for a USB or whatever header inside your case, as you're not going to stick a thumbdrive in there as much as you're going to run your HDDs outside of your case. Plus I'd imagine there's additional overhead as well, figuring out what you have connected etc.

 

Perhaps one day we will converge to a single connector for external devices, as USB-C (from what I see) is trying to do now, which I can find myself in. But to me, it doesn't make sense to have the internal components share connectors with external components. Too much complexity to have one object try to do everything.

 

Anyway, that's just my two cents  

[SpencerC]

Just now, tikker said:

You also realize that not everyone can afford an 8700k right?

If more pcie lanes means more expensive CPU, while technologically the limit of 16 is perhaps not the true limit, realistically for many people it is.

 

Personally I don't really see the point in merging everything into one connector. I like the bottom-up approach, KISS and have components do what they are good at. There's no need for a USB or whatever header inside your case, as you're not going to stick a thumbdrive in there as much as you're going to run your HDDs outside of your case. Plus I'd imagine there's additional overhead as well, figuring out what you have connected etc.

 

Perhaps one day we will converge to a single connector for external devices, as USB-C (from what I see) is trying to do now, which I can find myself in. But to me, it doesn't make sense to have the internal components share connectors with external components. Too much complexity to have one object try to do everything.

Or Thunderbolt. Out of all the standards, Thunderbolt is the closest to becoming the "one port for all the things". Now that Intel isn't hording the specifications anymore we should start to see quite a large influx of Thunderbolt capable devices. I know that not everyone can afford an 8770k. I guess my point was more geared towards @smeezer and him saying that PCIE lane limitations are "pure myth".

[tikker]

1 minute ago, SpencerC said:

Or Thunderbolt. Out of all the standards, Thunderbolt is the closest to becoming the "one port for all the things". Now that Intel isn't hording the specifications anymore we should start to see quite a large influx of Thunderbolt capable devices. I know that not everyone can afford an 8770k. I guess my point was more geared towards @smeezer and him saying that PCIE lane limitations are "pure myth".

Yeah I'd like better thunderbolt support on linux. I'm sorry, my comment about the 8700k wasn't geared towards you, but to OP just to mention that while not a technical limit, they are a practical limit most of the time.

[SpencerC]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Yeah I'd like better thunderbolt support on linux. I'm sorry, my comment about the 8700k wasn't geared towards you, but to OP just to mention that while not a technical limit, they are a practical limit most of the time.

Yeah, I really don't get his whole attitude towards SATA.......I mean, practically, who is running into a bottleneck on SATA besides the ultra high end enthusiast / enterprise (even then, most enterprise people run SATA in mass numbers).

[smeezer]

@SpencerC Comprising "most of the market" does not mean the same thing as "the only thing" on the market.  Again, I wasn't talking about mainstream market or mainstream boards. I'm not even saying every board should stop making Sata ports tomorrow.  Everything else is moving forward and SATA isn't. Is it because it can't or because computer component manufacturers have accepted what a couple of you can't and that is that Sata is a dinosaur. Admittedly, my original post doesn't explicitly state that nor does it explicitly state that I'm looking at it from an enthusiast standpoint. That's my bad. I do feel I clarified my intent in later comments though.
@tikker As I said to Spencer, my original post didn't do a great job of communicating the intent of my post, but it was less about combining specific connectors, I just used usb as a (albeit poor, I suppose) example of a way of helping Sata go gently into that good night.