no RAM, no SSD and no GPU PCs. AI is taking us to the dark ages
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Wouldn't people just be moving away from SATA SSDs because those M.2 NVMe SSDs or whatever they're called, the ones shaped like a rectangular wafer, seem superior in practically every way? Aren't there are also PCIe SSDs, at the very least, from Intel? (Edit: After a quick search, they appear to have been yet another long gone trend, another Intel thing that failed. The Intel 750 series were SSDs that plugged into graphics card slots.)
I don't like SATA at all. Never bought any SATA drives for anything I assembled.
I didn't know about Micron/Crucial exiting the RAM business. I remember thinking that they were some of the best priced in 2017 when there seemed to be a severe RAM price increase. GPUs were also very expensive at that time. I don't know when that 2017 crisis ended. I can only recall something about South Korean factories. Don't even know if it was RAM or GPUs that were coming out of those factories. I haven't been paying any real attention to computer hardware (or video games) since then: my memories are vague.
Back then, you had a few trends like Intel Optane. They were something like a cache between RAM and hard drives that sped up hard drives at times. That was a total flop. But people into custom PC building were going on about it at the time.
M.2 is the form factor
PCIe is the hardware interface
NVMe is the protocol, requires PCIe
Every single M.2 NVMe is a PCIe card. All those "NVMe PCIe adapters" are purely electrical. Maybe some noise suppression or something but there no active conversion going on.
If you're thinking of SSD cards like the Optane ones, those were designed for enterprise. They weren't even NAND. It was a different architecture to fill the gap between NAND and RAM. it only really mattered for datacenters because low-latency and mediocre sequential speed wasn't impressive for consumer usage. Also, Intel did their typical retard thing and locked it to specific chipsets. Great for databases though.
Intel didn't find a good use case for Optane. I remember LTT did a video of a PC that's RAM limited but has an Optane cache, it's still way slower than a PC with 16GB RAM
The distinction between the NVME SSD and SATA SSD is really the bus its designed around and plugged into. One plugs into a mainboard directly and the other plugs into a cable.
Both are memory based storage. The SATA cable is just a transfer throughput bottleneck. But there is also limited real estate on the footprint of a mainboard. It is easier to plug cables onto a board to expand storage, where there may only be room for 2 or 3 M2 slots on a standard form factor board.
In my memory, SATA was just associated with 'clunky' and 'slow'. A severe bottleneck.
I'd mess around with hard drives a lot as a more tech-savvy student, frequently data striping, data wiping, defragging, partitioning, and all that, so when it was time to assemble something for myself I recall wanting to avoid that.
I remember looking at the speed of M.2 NVMe and SATA SSDs and thinking that M.2 NVMe totally blew SATA out of the water. I was enthusiastic about trying it, even though NVMe SSDs were very expensive then compared to now.
When I started playing games installed on the M.2 NVMe SSD, the difference in loading speed just blew me away. I'd play Fallout: New Vegas on an old laptop and then again on my custom build and the loading screen, before much closer to a minute if I recall correctly, would be gone in just one or a couple of seconds.
I don't have much of an opinion on other computer hardware types, brands, or manufacturers, but I am opinionated on NVMe: The M.2 NVMe SSD is hands down my favourite computer component. Say goodbye to slow data wiping software and algorithms, defragging, cables, etc.
The shift from unicore to multicore CPU architecture and other major changes in computer hardware haven't impressed me the way that the shift from hard drives to M.2 NVMe SSDs have. Cheap M.2 NVMe drives are still impressive, cheap CPUs and GPUs, by contrast, are frustratingly bad. A budget gaming or video editing build won't be let down by a cheap M.2 NVMe drive, but by the cheap CPU and GPU.
This will be a pinch on ALL SSD, including NVMe, not just a pinch on SATA SSD exclusively.
That has a lot less to do with SATA than SSD vs spinning disk.
Make a spinning disc connect via NVMe, and it'll be just as ow as that laptop.
So what, you used exclusively IDE drives for the last 20+ years?
Pretty sure that M.2 NVMe has little to nothing to do with SATA or IDE. It's separate altogether.
I liked M.2 NVMe SSDs enough when I first started using them that I saw no reason to try other things like Intel Optane, SATA SSDs, or hybrid drives. I assumed that Optane would provide no worthwhile performance improvements, on the one hand, and that SATA SSDs and hybrid drives were too slow, on the other. That the SATA port is basically a severe bottleneck or whatever. M.2 NVMe is an unusual example of something actually being done right for once, whereas I thoroughly dislike hard drives.
I never assembled anything for home usage before NVMe came about. I wouldn't mind trying a PCIe SSD (Edit: Apparently these are no longer a thing) in some hypothetical future build, but I have no problem with M.2 NVMe. For instance, you don't need to do any of that time-consuming data wiping using software like DBAN on Samsung NVMe drives, their Secure Erase software does the job in a matter of seconds.
Ah, makes sense now.