The SATA interface has been around for a long time, it is mainly related to the use of conventional mechanical hard drives and optical drives. The first refuse to disappear but have the expiration date on the table, the second no longer exist on PC and the distribution of software in physical format has completely passed into history.
Does not allow good use of SSD in games
The advent of next-generation video game consoles resulted in the use of SSDs, but these were not connected to a SATA interface but to a fourth-generation PCI Express. Which has a bandwidth several times faster than the SATA interface.
The bandwidth advantage of the PCI Express interface will allow you to create games with unified cards without transitions, which is only possible by using interfaces with speeds of Gigabytes per second, against the information of Gigabits per second that can transmit at most the SATA interface.
In this case, SSDs, we are not faced with the limitations of conventional hard drives since the storage in both cases are NAND Flash memory chips, only modifying the communication interface.
The USB interface already replaces the SATA interface
If we look at the fastest SATA interface transfer speed available to date, we will see that it cannot exceed 6 Gbps, so it was already surpassed by the third generation USB interface and when the fourth generation is standardized, with a transfer speed of 40 Gigabits per second.
Many computer motherboards do not have SATA interfaces connected to their I / O or Southbridge controllers, but these interfaces are converted and rewired internally to PCI Express or USB interfaces. Therefore, most internal I / O controllers no longer support SATA and it is only through external converters that this type of interface is still supported.
When will the end be with the SATA interface?
Today there are many SATA devices out there, but the same could be said when ports like PS / 2, LPT1, COM, IEEE-1394 and many other I / O interfaces have appeared and disappeared over time. time. .
The disappearance of the SATA port will come from the hand of PC Gaming, as games at some point will begin to demand SSDs, as they will have to transport to and from consoles where the SSDs have a PCI Express interface. On the other hand, external storage based on USB interfaces can already operate at much higher speeds than SATA.
So it’s only a matter of time before the SATA interface falls into the spec lists and it will be sooner than is commonly believed.