When do you think SSD makers will stop making 2.5" SATA drives at competitive prices?

[cbn]

When do you think SSD makers will stop making 2.5" SATA drives at competitive prices?

At relatively competitive prices?

Or looking at the situation from a different angle.....when does a SATA 6 Gbps SSD start becoming a premium priced legacy product aimed at niche usages and niche demand?

One reason I am asking this is because I have noticed SATA 6 Gbps SSD controller development has decreased somewhat already. (See this thread for SATA 6 Gbps 3D NAND SSD controllers). The other reason I am asking is because I really like refurbished desktops and it would be great to see people still being able to upgrade these PCs with good (but affordable) SSDs at various points in the future.

 

[cbn]

One factor that will most likely contribute to the acceleration of low end NVMe SSDs replacing SATA 6 Gbps SSDs (even in the most budget builds and Pre-built desktops) is Host memory buffer.

So now with the ability of the NVMe SSD to share system memory a dram package is no longer needed on the device. This makes NVMe SSDs more affordable without hurting performance much (if at all).

I suppose DRAM-less SATA 6 Gbps is one way to keep this at bay, but eventually the PCIe 3.0 x 2 (and PCIe 3.0 x 4) controllers should fall in price as volume increases (via the number of PCs able to use this type of SSD increases).

 

[Stuka87]

I think it depends on whether faster SATA connections come out. M.2 and such is great, but most mobo's only have a single slot. Lots of us run lots of drives. A 12Gbps SATA would greatly extent the lifespan of the 2.5" form factor.