It would be kind of an awkward to adapt a new and fast NVME drive to a clunky old SATA controller. M.2 conversions would typically not have the physical space required for any active conversion circuitry, and it would be more expensive than buying a SATA drive. If you've got a full 2.5" bay, you can get native 2.5" consumer SATA SSDs up to 16TB... which is more than I want to read/write at SATA3 speeds. And if you want to take advantage of fast storage, you can just skip the whole SATA controller and use PCIE.

In an enterprise environment, nobody is really hooking up fast new storage to old slow storage controllers. They are either maintaining old systems, where they will use the legacy storage technologies, or they are deploying entirely new systems.

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aidenn0 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I looked into this as an option because (similar to the author, from the sounds of it[A]):

1. I already had a 2.5" hotswap setup

2. 2.5" 8TB SSDs are 4x as expensive as 8TB NVMEs.

A: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/NVMeOvertaking...

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benjiro 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The problem as pointed out by the author in the link, is that there simply is no storage solution that sits between a SATA HDD (cheapest 0.15 Euro/TB) > NVME (0.45 Euro/TB).

Technically, SATA SSD's need to fill this spot as a cheaper alternative but with their prices being just as expensive (often only 5% cheaper) as m.2. If SATA had a price range in the 0.30 EUro/TB, it will have been a great alternative to HDD based storage.

And you can go really crazy with bifurcation > 4/4/4/4x and then converting all those new m.2 slots to 6 SATA (ASM controller for cheap and work great). Plop, 24 SATA ports for 4W power draw.

But nobody is going to pay for SATA SSD's when they can just buy m.2 for the same price. So the result is that the SATA SSD market is "kind of dying", and manufactures look at it like 2.5" drives got looked at from HDD manufactures.

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cherryteastain 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It does not make sense for SATA SSDs to be priced 1/3 cheaper than NVMe as they use the same NAND flash as NVMe drives. NAND flash is a commodity so doing artificial segmentation with it is tricky. Controllers, I imagine, are cheaper since SATA is capped at 6Gbps (much lower than NVMe) but even if a SATA controller were half the price of a top end NVMe one, the controller would need to constitute 2/3 of the BOM cost of the SSD to enable a price reduction like that, which it does not.

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rasz 2 days ago | parent [-]

SATA tops out at 600MB/s meaning you can use cheaper denser NAND.

	▲	kube-system 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The cheapest NAND used on NVME drives is the same NAND used on the cheapest SATA drives.

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aidenn0 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Not the problem the author is pointing out (otherwise paying extra for an M2<->SATA adapter would be stupid). It's that the price of a SATA hard drive with capacity > 4TB is more (sometimes a lot more) than the price of an NVME hard drive of the same capacity.

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justsomehnguy 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> 2. 2.5" 8TB SSDs are 4x as expensive as 8TB NVMEs.

Huh?

870 QVO 8 TB SSD SATA III 2.5 inch: $629.99

Which is in the same range as M.2 ones.

Sure, you are getting gouged if try to buy it on Amazon but then... just don't buy it on Amazon?

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...

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benjiro 2 days ago | parent [-]

And that is the core of the problem. Your buying a storage media that is a lot slower in sequential read/write, and also on random's. But your paying the price of the superior m.2 NVME's.

SSDs need to sit more between HDD/NVME's, but they are on the same level as NVME.

Another issue, is just like with 2.5" drives, you see manufactures really only focus on specific drives. Its going to be 3.5" or U.2/U.3 and now NVME NAS solutions. But you do see any 2.5" / SATA solutions?

I mean, the only thing i remember seeing is the Synology DiskStation DS620slim that is now like 5 years old product. And still expensive as hell. Nobody makes any SATA products.

The market is now being a ton of Chinese brands / mini-pc makers that offer 4, 5, 6 NVME products. And even with PCIe3.0 x1 lane support, they are faster then SATA SSDs. And benefit from the massive better random/lower latency.

I love to shove a ton of SATA SSDs in a system, instead of HDDs but the prices need to be somewhere in the middle of HDD/NVMEs per TB. Not the same as NVMEs.

	▲	kube-system 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, when you connect expensive NAND to a slow SATA interface, you get something expensive and slow. That's a fundamental issue with the choice of technology, not an issue with the market. That's why nobody is doing this with new deployments.
	▲	justsomehnguy 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> But you do see any 2.5" / SATA solutions? > Nobody makes any SATA products. Because there is no demand for it. 2.5" HDDs stopped to grow in size 10 years ago. If you need capacity you use 3.5" HDDs, if you need speed you use M.2/2.5" SATA SSDs and 2.5" SATA HDDs... what are these could be used for? There is no capacity with 2.5" HDDs, it's only 1TB CMR HDDs x numdrives, ie 5TB RAW for 620slim, 4TB RAW for TS-410E. Or you risk it all and use a 4/5TB SMR HDDs for a ~20~25TB of RAW capacity and now you can't use RAID. So what the point? > but the prices need to be somewhere in the middle of HDD/NVMEs per TB ... and why a SATA SSDs should be cheaper than the NVMe ones? Especially if they are both use the same flash modules? https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-410e/specs/hardware

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stephen_g 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, there is very little reason to want to do this. It may become more of an issue if new SATA/SAS drives stop being produced anymore for maintaining those legacy systems - but at that point something based on an FPGA (as was suggested in another comment) is probably going to be more economic than a company bothering to spin an ASIC for the purpose. But I don't see SATA drives dying out for a fair while yet.

	▲	kube-system 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Usually the tail end of legacy systems are adequately supported by new-old-stock for quite a while. e.g. 3.5" floppies are 40 years old, were obsolete 25 years ago, went out of production 15 years ago, and are just about ready to deplete their stock today. Yes, there are flash-to-floppy adapter, and a similar thing may happen for SATA, but we may not see that as a necessity until 2050.