Will There Ever Be a New Version of SATA?

[DemonDragonJ]

For many years, SATA has been the standard connector for computer drives, and, as such, it has been revised several times; the original incarnation of SATA had a maximum data transfer rate of 1.5 Gbps, the second incarnation had a maximum data transfer rate of 3.0 Gbps, and the newest incarnation has a maximum data transfer rate of 6.0 Gbps.

However, there has not been a new incarnation of SATA in many years, which has me wondering if there shall ever be a new incarnation. SATA worked well with traditional hard drives, but solid-state drives have been increasing in speed rapidly, to the point that the SATA interface is actually a bottleneck in computer performance.

One would expect that a further revision of SATA, again doubling the data transfer rate to 12.0 Gbps, would be the most logical solution, but solid-state drives recently have been using PCI express as an interface, since that interface has very high data transfer rates.

What does everyone else here say about this? Will there ever be a new version of SATA, or have PCI express-based SSD’s rendered that connector obsolete?

[OvRiDe]

I don't think we will see a new revision of SATA. There is already 12GB/s availability using SAS drives, and with motherboard companies making M.2 more and more available, there might not me much of a need. It would also mean manufactures of both storage devices and motherboards would have to retool for yet another standard. So just like the IDE and before that the MMF standards, SATA will pretty much fade into the past making way for something newer and faster.

[DemonDragonJ]

I don't think we will see a new revision of SATA. There is already 12GB/s availability using SAS drives, and with motherboard companies making M.2 more and more available, there might not me much of a need. It would also mean manufactures of both storage devices and motherboards would have to retool for yet another standard. So just like the IDE and before that the MMF standards, SATA will pretty much fade into the past making way for something newer and faster.

Yes, that does make sense, although I do feel somewhat sad to hear it, since I have been using SATA drives for many years, although I am certain that the next computer that I build for myself shall have an M.2 drive.