Question And it's happening: storage options will be limited without Samsung SATA SSD

[DZero]

So yeah, it's happening way sooner than expecting:

Samsung to halt SATA SSD production, leaker warns of up to 18 months of SSD price pressure, worse than Micron ending consumer RAM

Samsung is reportedly preparing to wind down its SATA SSD business, and a notable hardware leaker warns the move could have broader implications for consumer storage pricing than Micron’s decision to end its Crucial RAM lineup. The report suggests reduced supply and short-term price pressure may...

www.notebookcheck.net

Samsung is reportedly preparing to wind down its SATA SSD business, and according to a well-known hardware leaker, the move could have far more serious consequences for consumer pricing than Micron’s decision to end its Crucial-branded consumer RAM lineup. The claim comes from Tom, host of the Moore’s Law Is Dead YouTube channel, who says multiple sources across distribution and retail have independently confirmed Samsung’s long-term exit from SATA SSD production. The leak comes after another report detailed that Samsung has raised DDR5 memory prices by up to 60%.

I know, Moore Law is Dead is not trusted, but seeing the current escalation, sad story, I have to say that those movements are getting insane to the point to see old hardware getting prices increases.
Next one might be the nVME storage and guys, prepare for the BIG ride

 

[mikeymikec]

It makes sense for Samsung to do this, as annoying as it is for me. I've built a somewhat larger stock of NVMe SSDs (normally I wouldn't stock any unless I saw a *great* price for one, like a 990 PRO 2TB I picked up during Black Friday sales for £120) in response to the current crisis and I therefore would logically want to stock some SATA SSDs too but I worry that the demand is so low these days that I'll be sitting on them for many months before getting a buyer. One of my suppliers has a 1TB 870 EVO for £10 more than the 500GB model which is a bit bizarre.

 

[iCyborg]

This is sad.
I wanted to buy a secondary Gen4 SSD, WD 7100 was CDN$330 or so, I see it's $480 now, Samsung 990 Pro also went in price, you could find them under $400.
At least I got on time for the primary SSD, WD 8100 for $560, it was the lowest price I've ever seen. And at Best Buy of all places.

I have a 1TB SATA SSD from previous build, and for backup I have Synology NAS with 2x10TB HDD. It'll to do for a while.

 

[CakeMonster]

Yep it makes sense given the market, so even if he's making it up as usual its still a quite likely outcome.

My lazy ass would love if there was high capacity SATA SSD's for easy installation/removal but that ship sailed long ago.

 

[Shmee]

IMO NVMe drives have made SATA SSDs a relatively poor bargain for a while now. The only thing is if you want an SSD pool for fileserver/NAS usage, SATA backplanes and cages tend to be much cheaper than NVMe ones. But I expect finding decent SATA SSDs like MX500 and 870 Evo to become much harder and more expensive now.

 

[Schmide]

Bought 4x 4tb 870 evos for $165 each couple years ago. My hoard is paying off.

 

[iCyborg]

I wonder if I should stock up on USB disks and SD cards before they go crazy too.
I have like 3-4 of each, but I've lost a bunch of them in the past. Lost as in they stopped working, not misplaced.

 

[DZero]

It seems that the panic is starting to be contagious, next are likely to be the storage, then follows the motherboards and also the power supplies.

What's next? screens? high tiers mouse and keyboards?

 

[Golgatha]

It seems that the panic is starting to be contagious, next are likely to be the storage, then follows the motherboards and also the power supplies.

What's next? screens? high tiers mouse and keyboards?

Honestly, even I'm in this boat now. I have 4 computers in my house (2 desktops, 1 fileserver, 1 laptop), and I bought 2 different 4TB NVME drives over the last couple of months to prepare for what I think will be, and so far it's turned out as I've thought since prices have gone up and up, the next shortage and/or price hike scenario for the next couple of years. I pray none of my RAM dies, even though at the moment it would all still be within the warranty period except for my fileserver. FWIW I also keep a spare 1000w power supply around in case any of those die too, and I would not have wanted to buy my Thermaltake GF3 for a spare at today's price of $230+ (I got mine for about $150 after taxes) either.

Also, it's sad to read above that Samsung exited the 2.5in SSD market. Crucial and Samsung have been my go-to brands for 2.5in SSDs for like a decade at least. Thankfully I'm full up on 2.5in SSDs of all capacities and generally have been phasing those out for NVME storage. However, for pure storage, there are only 2-3 NVME slots on any given motherboard and there are typically 4-6 SATA ports, not to mention older systems can't use NVME at all (I guess some can with a PCIe slot adapter if the BIOS supports it).

 

[In2Photos]

Does anybody else feel like the rising cost of GPUs, then RAM and now storage is to push everyone to cloud based computing? There's also been a huge push for data centers, but it's hard to tell what the specific purpose is for each of those data centers.

 

[Golgatha]

Does anybody else feel like the rising cost of GPUs, then RAM and now storage is to push everyone to cloud based computing? There's also been a huge push for data centers, but it's hard to tell what the specific purpose is for each of those data centers.

I think it's the long-term goal, or at least a fall-back plan if AI doesn't monetize well. Sad thing is this will be a computing power improvement for the majority, but a huge detriment to us enthusiasts. I bought my 64GB DDR5 kit to run a LLM locally for example. Most people are happy doing it remotely and letting a datacenter do the heavy computing. At today's prices, there's no way I would buy the 64GB kit just to tinker with AI stuff.

 

[mikeymikec]

Does anybody else feel like the rising cost of GPUs, then RAM and now storage is to push everyone to cloud based computing? There's also been a huge push for data centers, but it's hard to tell what the specific purpose is for each of those data centers.

If that were the case, it would be the largest price-fixing conspiracy ever.

 

[DZero]

Does anybody else feel like the rising cost of GPUs, then RAM and now storage is to push everyone to cloud based computing? There's also been a huge push for data centers, but it's hard to tell what the specific purpose is for each of those data centers.

Well... not really, ISP will massively increase the price of the internet connection, so yeah, cloud computing is a no go.

If somehow the conspiracy tries to go that way, the ISP won't allow that.

 

[Golgatha]

Paid $590 for an 8TB Lexar NM790 less than 3 months ago. Now it's listed at $1400!

 

[sao123]

Why would anyone care that obsolete storage options are discontinued in favor of newer ones?
Sata for a primary device is dead, NVME is better and faster. The days of needing 4 separate drives in a single computer are gone, and you can always get a pcie addin card if for some reason you do. This won't affect NAS builds as those are not SSD but still spinning magnetic disks, which are not being discontinued.
This is a lot to do about a nothing burger.

TL;DR: whaa, whaa tape drives and 5.25 floppies were discontinued decades ago.

 

[Shmee]

Why would anyone care that obsolete storage options are discontinued in favor of newer ones?
Sata for a primary device is dead, NVME is better and faster. The days of needing 4 separate drives in a single computer are gone, and you can always get a pcie addin card if for some reason you do. This won't affect NAS builds as those are not SSD but still spinning magnetic disks, which are not being discontinued.
This is a lot to do about a nothing burger.

TL;DR: whaa, whaa tape drives and 5.25 floppies were discontinued decades ago.

This isn't entirely true, as I explained in my post. Some NAS/server builds will use SSDs. I personally use a pool of 4x 2TB MX500s in mine, as well as 2x u.2 drives.

 

[bba-tcg]

Bought 4x 4tb 870 evos for $165 each couple years ago. My hoard is paying off.

I did too. Wish I'd bought more of them.

 

[sao123]

This isn't entirely true, as I explained in my post. Some NAS/server builds will use SSDs. I personally use a pool of 4x 2TB MX500s in mine, as well as 2x u.2 drives.

Kindly explain the logic of using a drive which is more likely to suffer from bit rot and affected by repeated read fatigue, over a drive less likely to suffer bit rot and does not suffer from repeated read fatigue?
There are no circumstances where using a sata SSD for a NAS Long term storage that makes sense. Enterprise grade servers are going to use SAS over Sata.

 

[mikeymikec]

Why would anyone care that obsolete storage options are discontinued in favor of newer ones?

I'd say I sold approximately as many SATA SSDs as NVMe SSDs this year, so I care.

 

[Golgatha]

Kindly explain the logic of using a drive which is more likely to suffer from bit rot and affected by repeated read fatigue, over a drive less likely to suffer bit rot and does not suffer from repeated read fatigue?
There are no circumstances where using a sata SSD for a NAS Long term storage that makes sense. Enterprise grade servers are going to use SAS over Sata.

Maybe he likes/needs the performance and he keeps multiple tested backups, including one off-site? I'd probably go that route if 18TB (x3 for the backups) of solid state storage was cost equivalent to my HDDs. Not to mention that I already own said HDDs.

 

[mikeymikec]

Kindly explain the logic of using a drive which is more likely to suffer from bit rot and affected by repeated read fatigue, over a drive less likely to suffer bit rot and does not suffer from repeated read fatigue?
There are no circumstances where using a sata SSD for a NAS Long term storage that makes sense. Enterprise grade servers are going to use SAS over Sata.

SSDs over HDDs in a NAS:

Speed (to a limited extent due to the networking element), noise, and reliability.

When you say "read fatigue", I assume you really mean "write fatigue". Techreport's SSD endurance trials showed the better drives from like 2014 lasting for 2.4PB worth of writes. I used a SATA SSD for the best part of ten years and only clocked about 20TB writes.

I don't know what you would class as "long term", but IMO there's two ways of looking at it:

1) Write-intensive environments
2) Environments where data is stored for many decades

I personally bet that a Venn diagram of the intersection between those two options is pretty minimal. I would also bet that write-intensive environments are much more likely to swap out "old" storage before it even reaches a decade in age. Furthermore logically people spec'ing a write-intensive environment are going to factor in the likely lifetimes of SSDs when making their decision regarding which storage medium to use.

Regarding the scenario where data is stored for many decades - is there any research out there that analyses how many decades HDDs are likely to remain reliable for?

If we're talking about a non-write-intensive 24/7 system, my bet by default would be that SSDs will last longer, simply because of the moving parts in HDDs. Furthermore, I've seen hundreds of HDDs fail. I'm pretty sure I can count the number of SSD failures I've experienced on one hand.

 

[bba-tcg]

I'd say I sold approximately as many SATA SSDs as NVMe SSDs this year, so I care.

As did I.

 

[EXCellR8]

I didn't think SATA SSD's, at least the 2.5" ones, were worth much if they are < 1000GB... I've got a stack of them I don't know what to do with. They're all ~250 or 500GB though.

I don't like getting rid of them either, since they are useful for OS drives in a pinch.

 

[mikeymikec]

I didn't think SATA SSD's, at least the 2.5" ones, were worth much if they are < 1000GB... I've got a stack of them I don't know what to do with. They're all ~250 or 500GB though.

I don't like getting rid of them either, since they are useful for OS drives in a pinch.

In my line of work, I use some as quick backup drives for customer data. This year was also likely a departure from normal business as I put a bunch of such drives into second-hand PCs I sold with Win11 on.

IME most people need maybe a 250GB system drive with easily enough room for relatively likely growth. I think if I still had a stack of 250GB SATA SSDs going into this price boom era, it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of customers were perfectly happy to save at least £50 on one of my computer builds by going with such a drive. As things are, I have to get 1TB drives of the type I prefer for triple the price of what I was paying a year or so ago for Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250GB drives. It's absurd.

With a bit of luck I'll get an even spread of customers opting to replace rather than upgrade their kit so I can recoup my stocks of (decent) second-hand drives (which I normally sell for half the price of what I would recommend for them as new).

Admittedly I'm also getting a slowly increasing stack of likely crap SATA SSDs, the sort one finds in first-gen SSD laptops from ten years ago. I'm not sure I want to sell any of those really. I've seen the health stats plummet on those while the respective Samsung PRO drives I bought at the same time are still stating ~95% health.

 

[sao123]

When you say "read fatigue", I assume you really mean "write fatigue". Techreport's SSD endurance trials showed the better drives from like 2014 lasting for 2.4PB worth of writes. I used a SATA SSD for the best part of ten years and only clocked about 20TB writes.

No, I mean Read Fatigue. Steven Hetzler published a paper on SSD Reliability when he worked at IBM.
It has been well documented through testing that repeatedly reading the same block can and will degrade it, AND potentially also degrade the adjacent memory sections as well.
(It was found because it happens even on read only areas of the SSD which are never written to)

There are many utilities and firmware updates which schedule frequently read areas to be re-written over time to help mitigate this effect.