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 follow as the market adjusts. Update: Samsung refutes the SATA SSD lineup demise rumor.
I have 4x 6TB HDDs in my NAS. Around 5 years ago I decided to simply replace any dead drives with 6TB ones instead of my previous strategy of slowly upgrading their size. I figured I could swap to 8TB 2.5" SATA SSDs that had just started to exist and would surely only get cheaper in the future…
M.2 to sata converters will probably come to your rescue. But probably not as cheap as you were hoping.
In my head I thought one could make relatively cheap high capacity in 2.5" SATA form factor by having more NAND chips of lower capacity. You give up speed and PCB space but that’s fine since bandwidth and IOPS are limited by SATA anyway and there’s plenty of space compared to M.2.
Turns out to not shake out that way, controller ICs that support SATA aren’t coming out any more, and NAND ICs are internally stacked to use up channels while not taking up PCB space.
There are some enterprise options, but they’re mad expensive.
I’ve cracked open a few faulty sata SSDs. Quite a few of the recent models are just 2242 or 2230 m.2 ssd’s with a converter. Even bigger 2TB ones.