At these speeds, will there really be a reason for SATA to still be a thing? Honest question since it seems no one is interested in making faster SATA... as well as maybe i'm just forgetting something as to why SATA 16Gbps would be preferred over USB 3.2 20Gbps

While most motherboards are still struggling to get USB 3.1 Gen 1 (10 Gbps)

That's USB 3.1 Gen 2 🙂

Aura89:

At these speeds, will there really be a reason for SATA to still be a thing? Honest question since it seems no one is interested in making faster SATA... as well as maybe i'm just forgetting something as to why SATA 16Gbps would be preferred over USB 3.2 20Gbps

Well SATA is here to stay for a couple of reasons the main is compatibility, all vendors are well aware of the standard and many devices support just SATA. second is cost. SATA is fairly cheap these days last I would say is that's its just enough. HHD don't need over 500~600MB/s of bandwidth and 600MB/s SATA SSD is plenty fast, for most users they won't feel any difference between 600MB/s and 2GB/s.

Aura89:

At these speeds, will there really be a reason for SATA to still be a thing? Honest question since it seems no one is interested in making faster SATA... as well as maybe i'm just forgetting something as to why SATA 16Gbps would be preferred over USB 3.2 20Gbps

It would be great to connect disks with a single cable that also deliver power, that's sure. But isn't USB protocol affected by an higher overhead?

Aura89:

Honest question since it seems no one is interested in making faster SATA... as well as maybe i'm just forgetting something as to why SATA 16Gbps would be preferred over USB 3.2 20Gbps

SATA Express dies a quick death as M.2 quickly gained support. I believe the main reason was that people instantly fell in love with the lack of cables for M.2 3X4 (I know I did) and the far better speed on M.2 3X4. SATA at this point seems to be the perfect home to very large HDDs and M.2 is quickly becoming the standard for OS/Apps drive. SATA will eventually become a slight sequential bottleneck for HDDs but it wont matter as the massive size of HDDs makes them a better choices for multi-drive NAS where you have both RAM and SSD options for caching rendering the SATA sequential speed bottleneck meaningless. The NAS is where USB speed coincidentally comes into play. If you have a NAS with 4 HDDs, a SSD for cache and 16 GB of DDR4 you are going to want a super fact connection to it and USB 3.2 is a great choice for this task. The 2 trends I expect to see for SATA are larger SATA SSDs with better 4KQ1T1 speed and HDDs with monstrous capacities. For fast SSDs it will be all M.2, soon to be PCIe gen 4 X 4 lanes.

HardwareCaps:

W last I would say is that's its just enough. HHD don't need over 500~600MB/s of bandwidth and 600MB/s SATA SSD is plenty fast, for most users they won't feel any difference between 600MB/s and 2GB/s.

I don't disagree that most users won't feel the difference however i think it's a poor argument that since people won't always feel the difference then therefore we should just use worse technology for SSDs, when in reality we should be using what will allow our products to work the best. Yes, there's NVME drives and etc. that can do that for us, but unless NVME drives are the future and traditional 2.5/3.5 drives go away, then, again, i don't see that is a particularly useful argument.

I dont even use the speed 3.0 give forget about 3.1 and 3.2

Aura89:

I don't disagree that most users won't feel the difference however i think it's a poor argument that since people won't always feel the difference then therefore we should just use worse technology for SSDs, when in reality we should be using what will allow our products to work the best. Yes, there's NVME drives and etc. that can do that for us, but unless NVME drives are the future and traditional 2.5/3.5 drives go away, then, again, i don't see that is a particularly useful argument.

Well MBs offer both M.2 and SATA, its just that even if you're an enthusiast, it is likely that you won't need more than 2 M.2 for fast SSDs. for mass storage HD still rule and they barely need 300MB/s. it is not about "the best tech" its about profit and market share, how many people actually need something faster than SATA? I'd say 3% of the market, when the demand for faster connectors will rise so does supply

tsunami231:

I dont even use the speed 3.0 give forget about 3.1 and 3.2

I have a SanDisk Extreme Pro 3.1 flash drive, it is crazy fast. Once you install Windows from something like this you can't ever go back.

Aura89:

At these speeds, will there really be a reason for SATA to still be a thing? Honest question since it seems no one is interested in making faster SATA... as well as maybe i'm just forgetting something as to why SATA 16Gbps would be preferred over USB 3.2 20Gbps

I have a few answers to that: 1. SATA4 would likely cannibalize SAS and M.2 sales. Once the latest generation of SAS-4 (22Gbps) is well-established, it wouldn't surprise me if we see SATA4 (probably at 12Gbps). 2. USB is technologically inferior to SATA at a lower-level in various ways. It's a lot more CPU intensive and to my understanding, it has a lot higher latency. USB also uses a polling system, whereas I think SATA can work via interrupts. As mentioned earlier, compatibility is another bonus to SATA. To my understanding, USB is also strictly userland hardware, whereas SATA works at the kernel level. I may be wrong about this, though. 3. The available bandwidth is the peak bandwidth, but not the effective bandwidth. The average PC only has 2 or 3 host controllers, where all the other ports are divided via internal hubs. For example, the PC I'm using right now has 12 USB ports but there are only 2 host controllers, so that means there are 6 USB ports per host. The bandwidth must be divided among each port (note, the bandwidth isn't evenly divided, which is a good thing). So, if I were to record HD video from a webcam plugged into the same host controller, I could suffer bandwidth issues. Each SATA port has (or is supposed to anyway) un-divided bandwidth. That being said, a SATA3 drive has the potential to operate faster than a USB 3.2 drive, depending on the workload. 4. Not really a problem for other OSes, but Windows is a PITA when it comes to installing on a USB drive.