It’s an interesting time for the storage market. Just like SATA SSDs before it, NVMe has shaken up the industry, providing another big jump in performance. So where does that leave other media? Chris Evans breaks down how price, capacity, and exploitable capability will cause the various media to shake out in the market.
Chris sees NVMe as the obvious choice for performance, with Micron using it exclusively for their high performance models. But he notes that right now, SATA SSDs still provide the best TCO for public cloud providers and other hyperscalers. Since they buy the majority of bits shipped, it stands to reason that while the SATA SSD may be edged out on the highest end, it’ll still have a place where capacity and TCO are important.
Chris was less optimistic on SAS SSDs, which he likens to the squeeze put on 10K hard drives when the first SSDs first hit the market.
Chris Evans comments:
Micron has recently announced a refresh to their 5100 SATA SSD series with the release of the 5200 series using 64-layer 3D-NAND technology. As discussed on our most recent Storage Unpacked episode with Jim Handy, 3D technology is starting to get into its stride. So, why still focus on SATA drives when as we know (see this post) NVMe provides so much more performance?
Read more at: Making The Case for SATA SSDs
