Sata and USB merge? Why not???

[TheCherryKing]

I don't see SATA and USB merging but I do see SATA, SAS, and u.2 merging. The u.2 NVMe host bus adapters are backwards compatible with SAS and SATA. I see SATA ports being entirely replace by u.2 ports in five years.

[tikker]

20 minutes ago, smeezer said:

@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.

Well sorry to be blunt, but you should've thought of a better topic title and phrasing if you don't want to discuss about merging SATA and USB... Elaborate and/or edit the first post to clarify? Most people won't dig through all responses. Anyway, it isn't of importance whether you advocate the literal replacing/combining of USB and SATA. From your response I gather you don't necessarily strive for a single connector, you just want to kill off SATA (and so by extension conventional HDDs/SSDs). This won't go down easily, for reasons already mentioned.

 

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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.

We are moving forward, just not with SATA as it's doing just fine. With SSDs we now can saturate a SATAIII connection, yet sometimes we need those faster transfers. That's one of the reasons why we've started developing NVMe. Spinning disks (and SATA SSDs? not completely sure), on the other hand, do not, so there's no need. Furthermore, HDDs are still everywhere, as it is affordable mass storage. This ties in to what @AshleyAshes said, running 14 drives using only 3 PCIe lanes vs needing 42 lanes would you want to run 14 4x NVMe SSDs.

 

This reminds me about a topic the other day about why we don't make smaller ethernet cables since everything is being shrunk. You'd break more by creating a new standard then what you'd practically gain, i.e. why fix something that isn't broken. RJ45 connectors are everywhere and so are SATA devices. So you'll suddenly force a lot of people, datacenters etc to do expensive upgrades since all of their storage has become obsolote.

 

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Again, I wasn't talking about mainstream market or mainstream boards. I'm not even saying every board should stop making Sata ports tomorrow.

Maybe down the road, when more lanes becomes standard and accessible to the general public we'll see a slow phasing out of SATA ports, but as of yet it's unrivalled in terms of cost (both money and lane-wise) to "performance", I'd say. High end equipment already starts offering NVMe stuff. SATA ports are probably dead-cheap anyway, so why not put them on there and keep customers happy 

[smeezer]

@tikker At the time of posting I wouldn't say I didn't want to discuss it, @NumLock21 made a calm and informative post dealing with that and that was really cool.  It was ashleys unnecessarily snarky post that made me reconsider my interest in the topic and put me in troll mode.