SATA Solid State Drives Are Still Good Buys
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are pretty cheap now, and SATA drives are still around. Are SSDs based on older technology still good buys, and should you use them at all?
As hard drives slowly fall out of favour of being a mass storage medium for desktop and laptop computers, consumers are gradually choosing solid state storage to host the games that can’t fit on their main drive after installing Call of Duty Black Ops 6. But are SSDs based on older technology still good buys, and should you use them at all?
In the beginning, there was nothing. And suddenly, there was the Dataram BULK CORE 2MB Solid State Drive (SSD) manufactured in 1976. The technology to design and build solid-state storage has been around for decades but as with all things in the computer industry, it only makes sense if you can scale production. The BULK CORE was priced starting at $9700, and was intended for use in minicomputers like the DEC PDP-11 (it took up a full server rack, actually).
It was the world's first solid state drive using non-volatile memory.
All the familiar components are still there right from the start. The BULK CORE had eight individual boards each housing 256KB of non-volatile memory. If any of them failed, you could swap out the faulty board for a new one and then reprogram the controller to recognise the new storage. Seek times were under a millisecond, and bandwidth was through the roof for 70’s technology.
Dataram would later follow this up with the BULK CORE 200 series, which increased the maximum addressable storage to 8MB.
The controller, a BULK CORE Interface (BCI), could address the storage space it shipped with as well as additional memory housed in a separate expander chassis. It featured hardware-based error correction and parity checking for each board. The DEC systems it was designed to interface with had no idea where data was actually being saved to - the storage medium was transparent to the host system because it emulated traditional disk and tape storage.
Just like a modern SSD.
Today, SSDs are a lot simpler. They consist of a controller and non-volatile flash storage, typically in the form of NAND flash memory modules. Sometimes there is a primary cache in the form of a DDR3 or DDR4 memory module. The rest of the components are supporting hardware controlling power delivery, noise filtering, and interfacing with the host system.
They’re also so much smaller. The miniaturisation of computer components has allowed SSDs to fit into chassis as big as a 2.5” drive, or as small as the M.2 2230 form factor. The small size befits mass production, which sees hundreds of millions of these things being made every year.
The bulk of the cost in a SSD is the controller, the housing, the printed circuit board (PCB), and support components. The flash memory is so cheap that it has become downright uneconomical to make drives smaller than 512GB.
Improvements in the density of memory and the relative speed they are capable of has made older technology less attractive from a manufacturing standpoint and, as a result, most 128GB and 256GB drives are almost selling at a loss to the manufacturer.
Solid State Drives For Mass Storage?
Solid State Drives on modern interfaces might reach higher sequential speeds in practice, but most software isn’t geared to take advantage of that.
Bethesda’s Starfield runs like molasses on a hard drive, but there’s little practical difference in loading times or running the game between SATA and NVMe SSD storage because the vast majority of accesses to a drive are done at random intervals and at lower speeds.
As more games rely on streaming assets, keeping less-played games on a slower hard drive will begin to degrade the experience playing the game. You should absolutely slap those on to an SSD if you have the space available.
What you’re getting out of an NVMe interface is speed when speed is needed, and a slimmer form factor. But when it comes to latency and access times, and running games, even a SATA SSD might still hold its own.
Most motherboards typically have two M.2 slots on average, and four or more SATA ports. As a result, you can attach much more SATA storage to most motherboards, and the limitations of the interface aren’t severe enough in practice to matter for most people looking for somewhere to install Red Dead Redemption 2 (I'll finish it one day, I promise!).
So if you’re on a desktop computer or laptop and you’re looking for additional storage, you could pick up a NVMe drive if you have a slot available for one. But if you only have SATA ports free, that’s still perfectly fine. The vast majority of SATA drives available today in high capacities are held back by the SATA interface’s theoretical performance limits, and are just as reliable.
If all you want to do is throw in more storage for games you’ll sometimes play, a SATA SSD is still a reasonable choice.
You might need some links to get you started, so here are a few drives that we like at the office:
Seagate BarraCuda 960GB 2.5-inch SATA
