Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is SATA Obsolete?”.
Fourteen hundred dollars, that’s how much you pay back in 2015 for two terabytes of top-end nvme storage for your computer, but nowadays you can get the same thing for around 250 bucks nvme drives have gone from a luxury reserved for the one percent to a standard inclusion On even some budget laptops costing less than three hundred dollars, oh, we fancy huh so with nvme having become so accessible. What’S the prognosis for sata, does it still have some life left to live, or is it close to joining those old school gray ribbon cables? In that big e-waste bin in the sky, well part of the reason those old gray cables used by a standard called p-a-t-a died out was because peda was used almost exclusively by mechanical hard drives, whereas consumer ssds, nearly always used sata, seeing as sata was also compatible With hard drives, there just wasn’t any reason to keep these slow bulky airflow restricting pata standard around more like p-i-t-a. Am i right, but an even bigger reason. Those died out was because the leap from mechanical to solid-state storage was a huge deal even for a user who didn’t know or care anything about how their computer worked. Switching to a sata ssd made a huge difference in overall responsiveness. By contrast, the leap from sata to nvme isn’t nearly as big for the average user, and many people can’t even tell the difference in day-to-day use unless they’re often moving large files around. This means that for many people, paying the price premium for nvme over sata just isn’t really worth it, but, as we mentioned, nvme is quickly getting cheaper. So what happens when the price gap closes completely, we’ll tell you right after we thank ifixit for sponsoring today’s video ifixit makes compact tool kits with all the essential bits to fix small electronics. The minnow set has 16 steel driver bits that work with most laptops, desktops and smartphones.
The more a set has 32 bits with the additional bits for fixing things like home appliances and furniture. Both have magnetic lids built-in, sorting trays and a four millimeter swivel top driver. All wrapped up in a canvas tool, roll delicious repair, your devices today and learn more by going to ifixit.com forward slash techwiki. So it turns out that seda’s advantages don’t stop at just being cheaper.
For starters, if you need to put lots of storage in your system, sata is still the way to go. Even premium. Motherboards often don’t have more than three m.2 slots for nvme drives, whereas the cheapest motherboards will usually have at least four sata headers and stepping up to something higher end will give you six or more, even if your case doesn’t have room to properly mount all those Sata ssds yeah, you could just let them sit loosely inside.
We won’t tell the pc building police and if you need even more sata ports, you could also buy an expansion card. Sata drives are also a heck of a lot easier to unplug or reconnect. If you find that you need to swap them out often m.2 drives, are a little bit more finicky and need to be screwed down. Another major consideration is bandwidth using an nvme ssd takes up some of your pci express lanes commonly a total of four many modern cpus can support one nvme drive and one graphics card, but any more than this and you’ll have to make choices about how many lanes To allocate to each device, graphics cards can usually run at x8 without too much trouble. But if you have more than two nvme drives and have to bump the gpu down to x4 you’re going to start seeing performance drops, while gaming sata by contrast, is separate from your pci express bus and typically connects to your chipset, meaning it won’t interfere with anything. You have installed in your pci express slots unless you’re using a sata expansion card, so you can install as much storage as you want and it won’t interfere with your frame rate, it’s storage that knows to stay in its lane and of course, we can’t forget that Mechanical hard drives are still in fact, a thing that people buy they’re still significantly cheaper per gigabyte than even a sata ssd for long-term mass storage and new drives are still being developed. Both seagate and western digital now have 20 terabyte mechanical drives on the market, and higher capacities should follow in the years to come.
Even though seagate actually recently demoed a hard drive with an nvme connection, the idea there is simply to make it easier to link them up with nvme ssds in data centers for most users, sata will still be the connector of choice for hard drives when they need Large amounts of cheap storage – it may not be around forever but like an old guy who takes a part-time gig at home depot instead of retiring sata has enough advantages to keep it relevant for years to come. Just don’t mention the good old days, you’re, never going. Gon na get out of there hey thanks for watching like the video, if you liked it, if you didn’t like it dislike it check out our other videos, comment below with video suggestions and hey, maybe even subscribe and follow whatever .