Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon
40 comments
·December 15, 2025Neil44
mwambua
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?
barrkel
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.
gary_0
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.)
1970-01-01
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
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.
xyse53
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).
rpcope1
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_d6
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.
barrkel
Fwiw, SATA and NVMe are mutually incompatible concepts for a single device; SATA drives use AHCI to wrap ATA commands in a SCSI-shaped queuing mechanism called command lists over the SATA bus, while NVMe (M.2/U.2/add-in) drives talk NVMe protocol (multiple queues) over PCIe.
pzmarzly
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.
poly2it
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.
toast0
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.
crote
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.
wtallis
Can you point to a specific motherboard? 16 separate PCIe links of any width sounds rather high for a consumer platform.
nonameiguess
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.
esjeon
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. :/
up2isomorphism
People are at same time complaining about data slow but they seem to happily paying AWS 10x for less iops and bandwidth.
fckgw
What does this have to do with consumer SATA SSDs?
tart-lemonade
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.
crote
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?
gotodengo
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.
nemomarx
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
crote
Counterpoint: who needs that much fast storage?
4 M.2 NVMe drives is quite doable, and you can put 8TB drives in each. There are very few people who need more than 32TB of fast data access, who aren't going to invest in enterprise hardware instead.
Pre-hype, for bulk storage SSDs are around $70/TB, whereas spinning drives are around $17/TB. Are you really willing to pay that much more for slightly higher speeds on that once-per-month access to archived data?
In reality you're probably going to end up with a 4TB NVMe drive or two for working data, and a bunch of 20TB+ spinning drives for your data archive.
paulbgd
pcie expansion cards? SATA isn’t free and takes away from having potentially more PCIE lanes, so the only real difference here is the connector
null
esseph
PCIE expansion card with m2 slots?
(SSDs are "fine", just playing devil's advocate.)
8cvor6j844qw_d6
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
SATA, not NVMe, they will still be making SSDs.
jajuuka
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
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.
zb3
Fsck this cartel.. I hope China will fill these gaps and help restore normal prices.
Flavius
You will be down-voted to hell for this comment, but luckily their down-votes can't stop China. Tariffs can though...
cheema33
> 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.
Analemma_
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).
zb3
Funnily enough, I wasn't even downvoted yet :D
But you see, it's hard to post smarter comments when the title and the article don't help..
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.