SSDs and the future of SATA 3

So from what i have figured out is there will be no future SATA 4 so what is the future of faster SATA 3 drives? I have an sammy 840 but i was hopping that down the road a faster one would exist. I am not concerned about sequential because any gain in that is not really that tangible. I am more concerned about 4K and 512k reads/writes. You can throw in a SATA3 drive that is leagues faster than a SATA 2 drive of the day and see tangible differences mostly due to 4k and 512k speeds. Do you think any significantly faster SATA 3 drives will come out or are we kinda just boned with a dead end?

 

The next step up from SATA 3 is PCI Express. If each PCIe lane can transfer 1 GB/s (or 500 MB/s) and there are multiple lanes, that's a huge improvement over SATA 3. As far as notebooks are concerned, an M.2 slot -- one that is connected to PCIe lanes -- is required to use PCIe SSDs. Right now there are only a few notebooks with this feature. I actually created a thread about it not too long ago (see here). The number of M.2 PCIe SSDs available is also small.

That's only half the story, though. The other thing is the transition from AHCI to NVM Express. It promises lower latencies and exploits parallelism among other things. You can imagine 4 kB (and other small sizes) read and write performance increasing considerably.

 

What's the future of SATA III drives? Keep using them until they die, I suppose.

SATA's far from being dead in the desktop, and in the laptop I don't see it going away anytime soon. But yeah, future standards like M.2 will probably replace SATA whenever the price/GB of SSDs comes close enough to the price/GB of mechanical hard drives.

 

The future is M.2 PCIe SSD's with NVMe controllers, but all current M.2 drives use SATA controllers.

 

The numbers posted are sequential read/write speeds and only should be used under "ideal" conditions, as you stated 4k speeds are more important in normal everyday tasks.

My old Samsung 840 500 GB SSD in my R2 (single SSD):



My old Intel 320 series 160 GB RAID 0 in my R2:



The RAID 0 array in a everyday sense blew the 500 GB SSD away. Windows booted to a usable desktop under 8 seconds. It ran, extracted, installed Office 2007 in like ~5 seconds. Everything ran much faster.

 

i personally am tempted to run raid 0 but i dont have the time or money at the moment to bother with it.

your 840 blows for 500GB BTW. As you can see after a little while my writes took a huge hit with use.