SATA connector hard drives hasn’t upgraded its specs for years and has remained in its third generation or better known as the 6 Gbps connector. Which indicates a future demise of it, but it still endures due to the huge number of devices and components that use it. What is the reason for this lack of development in recent years?
It must be taken into account that the SATA connector is a connector designed for hard disks, so it will be the speed needs of these that will determine whether to use a faster interface or keep the current one. For example, as said connector was a bottleneck for SSDs, eventually PCI Express solutions appeared. On the other hand, we haven’t seen them applied to hard drives. The reasons ? Simple, being based on mechanical elements, hard disks are much slower because they have to reposition the needle on the magnetic disk.
SATA connector stagnation
Currently, the fastest hard drive is the Seagate Barracuda Pro, with a size of 12TB and capable of reaching a maximum transfer speed of 250MB/s. That is, when the data is in the outermost sectors disk and the data transfer is sequential. If we change it to Gbps, we have that it’s 2 Gbps, which means it doesn’t even saturate a 3 Gbps SATA-II connection.
That is, if the fastest hard drive on the market uses no more than 33% of the transfer speed, and that’s a best-case scenario. What is the point of improving the speed of the SATA connector? Also, as we said at the beginning, the motivation for the improvement would be in the SSDs, but since PCI Express already existed with few lines, it was seen as a waste of time to evolve said connector. Which is always maintained in computers because it is that of hard drives.
The future goes through hard drives also NVMe
The NVMe 2.0 standard has been extended to also support hard drives, so in the future we will see models that will connect to our PC without using a SATA interface, but rather a PCI Express. While we won’t see this change until 2024, it’s pretty important to say that the SATA connector on new motherboards has been numbered for years and it’s normal for it to gradually disappear.
Remember that the disappearance of a port does not mean that the units using it will do so, in the same way that the fact that the PS/2 port is no longer used did not mean that there were no more keyboards or mice or that the death of VGA with monitors. In fact, the SATA connector disappeared years ago, because on many motherboards the signal is converted to a USB 3.0 connector. The reason? No hard drive can reach 5Gbps in speed, but the downside is that SATA drives are affected by this.
