The sales of the sata hard drives, as well as SSDs that use the same interface, are getting smaller and smaller, indicating the disappearance of said port over time. Is the switch to SSDs inevitable or will the future interface eventually adopt classic hard drives as well? Let’s see what the trends are.
In fact, the SATA port in terms of data is long dead, what is done today is to use a connector of this type, but in the back room it is usually a PCIe connection using single data pin or USB. The change has therefore already taken place, in a subtle way and without our noticing it. Now the next step is the physical disappearance of the port, which is maintained because there is still a demand for components that continue to use it.
Fewer and fewer SATA hard drives and SSDs are sold
The SATA port hasn’t been renewed for over a decade and is stuck at a transfer speed of 6 Gbps, which is more than enough for hard drives which, due to physical limitations, usually never reach this transfer speed. However, this is a problem for SATA SSDs who see how their counterparts via PCI Express in M.2 format become faster and the benefit of their larger storage per form factor seems to weigh little. The reason? They are in both worlds or are, rather, players of all, but masters of none.
This is perhaps why in the data compiled by Puget Systems and which you can see above these lines, NVMe SSDs already hold 3/4 of the market and seeing the trend, said market share will continue to grow, sweeping away SATA devices in the process until they disappear from the market. Which is a slow and agonizing end to SATA hard drives and solid-state drives.
Put data in context
In any case, extracting said information without taking into account the context is useless, it is necessary to start from the fact that the majority of computer sales are laptops, which for a long time did without SATA disks inside until now to the point that it’s impossible to place one in multiple PCs, there’s no space or bays to do so.
In a tower PC, although it can be done, the higher speed of NVMe SSDs is what makes them the preferred one. Also, once DirectStorage is standardized for gaming, then we’ll see how games need drives that can transmit multiple gigabytes per second and the SATA interface doesn’t achieve those speeds.
What has the expiration date is the SATA port
Many interpret our words as the end of hard drives, these will instead continue to be used when needed, whether connected to a third generation USB port or internally. What many often forget is that the NVMe 2.0 standard includes the use of hard drives, which could be seamlessly connected to a single-lane PCIe interface to send and receive data.
What’s more, there is every reason to believe that developing operating systems like Windows 12 are adopting a file system organization more suited to an SSD, non-volatile RAM, than to a hard disk. There will therefore be a reversal of the tables. The fact is that we will most likely see a new port for hard drives from a certain date and it will replace the SATA port in computers. However, for backwards compatibility, we will see it for several years in motherboards.
