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This seems like a non issue dramatised for headlines, they are phasing out outdated sata connection to only favour current m.2.
It's like gpu and motherboard manufacturers announcing they are no longer including VGA ports in favour of DVI display port and HDMI. I don't think that was a bad thing.
I'm sure some people who are lucky enough to have hardware that still requires SATA want to keep upgrading to new SATA devices but it's been enough time. I'm ok with just m.2 now.
Tell that to my school division's IT department, who have us all running Displayport to VGA adapters, attaching to our monitors and projectors via VGA. This is because our displays are either a) too old and only support VGA and DVI in, or b) they purchased displays with HDMI, but our ThinkPad laptops only have Displayport out.
Sometimes it is more a matter of mixing and matching tech in large cash-strapped systems that might get slapped by these issues as well.
And yes, those adapters cause as many headaches as you might think.
As long as they keep selling the flash memory chips to drive makers, what's the big deal of them dropping the SATA protocol from their consumer devices?
There are plenty of China-based companies which still make flash memory drives with a SATA interface using Samsung chips and at this point that tech is so mature that there really isn't any great added value in terms of performance from getting Samsung SATA drives over getting some generic SATA drives with Samsung chips.
It actually makes some sense that Samsung is focusing their consumer-facing device production in a higher performance protocol which is very well established now and were the device speeds are not constrained by the protocol itself, rather than in a protocol were the maximum speed of the protocol (600 MB/s) is actually what constrains the device performance since the memory chips themselves are capable of more.
As a consumer, 6 or 7 years ago it definitelly made sense to get a Samsung SATA drive because they were actually some of the fastest in the market, but these days even shitty-shit no-name brand has SATA devices with 580MB/s read speeds (and, if large enough, similar write speeds) which is near the theoretical maximum of SATA3 and M.2 devices supporting PCI4 x16 offer several times the speeds of that.
AFAIK this has already been a problem, you can find Samsung M.2 SSDs for cheaper than Samsung SATA SSDs at the same capacity, because their cloud customers have all flown past classic SATA/SAS for NVME U.2 and U.3, which is much more similar to M.2 due to NVME.
I was planning on adding a big SSD array to my server which has a bunch of external 2.5 SAS slots, but it ended up being cheaper and faster to buy a 4 slot M.2 PCIe card and buy 4 M.2 drives instead.
Putting it on a x16 PCIe slot gives me 4 lanes per drive with bifurication, which gets me the advertised maximum possible speed on PCIe 4.
Whether or not the RAM surge will affect chip production capacity is the real issue. It seems all 3 OEMs could effectively reduce capacity for all other components after slugging billions of dollars into HBM RAM. It wouldn't just be SSDs, anything that relies on the same supply chain could be heavily affected.
Crap, I really wanted to buy a new external HD for my home server setup sometime soon.
I knew I should have hoarded devices. Could have at least profited from selling RAM...
