Could USB replace SATA?

pete6032

Diamond Member
Dec 3, 2010
8,418
3,815
136
Is it likely that in the near future instead of having SATA ports on motherboards and drives, we will just have USB3 plugs on both the motherboard and SSD?
 

nerp

Diamond Member
Dec 31, 2005
9,867
105
106
No, we're moving to m.2 nvme and pcie based storage.
 

Insert_Nickname

Diamond Member
May 6, 2012
4,971
1,696
136
Even if we didn't have those techs, USB 3.0 (up to 5 Gb/s) is slower than SATA 6 Gb/s so we want to go forward, not backwards.

10Gbit USB3.1 takes care of the speed issue, but the real problem is that UASP (SCSI via USB) tanks in performance when you go much over QD4. USB just isn't suitable for high performance disks.

So the answer to the OP's question is a no.
 

nerp

Diamond Member
Dec 31, 2005
9,867
105
106
Three SSDs? Just get two 1tb samsungs. Ditch the spnning internal HD. PSU is overkill. Do you need a CD drive still? Liquid cooling is probably overkill. Ditch the 980Ti and get a 1080. Just my thoughts.
 

Wall Street

Senior member
Mar 28, 2012
691
44
91
On top of the points mentioned, USB doesn't support DMA (for justified security reasons). This results in a big performance / CPU utilization hit relative to SATA or PCIe when large files are being copied. Essentially, this means that your SATA drive can dump data directly to addresses in RAM while USB 3.0 doesn't have RAM access and needs to send everything through the CPU first.