Future of m.2 SATA ? ( not nvme )

[Donnie Fisher]

I’m in the process of changing my nas from a rack server sat in the garage to something much smaller. It has to serve storing photos and docs, and has a dedicated cctv HDD in it ( which I’ll keep )

Over the 8 years of using a nas, its only acquired about 750gb of data and its not going up very quickly either … so the thought has occurred that I could move to SSD storage. Physically, the best use of space would be a carrier which fits 4x m.2 SATA drives in the space of a single 3.5 bay.

With the likes of Truenas I could initially have 2x2tb m.2 drives, expanding to a second pair later to increase the space … and then from there swapping out with larger ones as time goes on.

but that’s SATA ... And not nvme, which seems to be the more prevalent m.2 format.

Is SATA m.2 going to run out of steam, or do you think that in 4 years time, you’ll be able to get large volume SATA drives in an m.2 format ?

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Thats my thought, it already feels like SATA m.2 is shrinking in options, and to go down that route is like walking down an alley where you can see it’s maybe a dead end, yet nvme clearly seems to have a future.

It’s just a pity there isn’t something like a sas-like controller card you can plug multiple nvme’s into, yet only use an 8x slot. ( i know it’d reduce speed, but hey! )

Maybe I should sack the idea and stick with a couple of hdd’s

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Agreed that nvme has benefits. But speed becomes a moot point in a nas that’ll be on a gigabit network. HDD’s can saturate it, SATA SSD definitely will with the benefit of near instant response from cold and lower power usage ( a goal of this project ) Nvme better again i suppose Over sata.

but … nvme needs lanes to the cpu, of which its not easy to expand.

For example, the itx board i‘m going to be using has 2x m.2 slots. cause it’s an AM4 with APU, as I understand it, that’ll leave me 8x lanes on slot one of the board … a pcie card in there would get me another 2 nvme drives maybe.

Sata gets me more with less hassle. The board has 4 sata slots from the outset. I could easily add another 8 SATA slots through a relatively cheap controller card running in IT mode. In a case that i can reasonably fit 3x 3.5hdds and some 2.5 drives ... Through m.2 drives i could fit a lot into that small space.