By Stacey Peterson via Tech Target

As NVMe SSDs make inroads into the enterprise market, the question remains: What’s in store for SAS drives? While they don’t provide the performance enhancements and latency reduction of NVMe SSDs, they do have a future.

For all enterprise storage — HDDs and SSDs combined — SAS drives dominate in terms of exabytes (EB) shipped, and they will continue to dominate the market for years to come, according to the analyst firm TrendFocus Inc. Nevertheless, TrendFocus found PCIe-based drives surpassed SAS and SATA SSDs in 2019 by nearly 2 EB shipped. That’s a trend expected to continue in the SAS vs. NVMe rivalry, as NVMe brings speed and efficiency advantages to the SSD market. NVMe uses PCIe to transfer data to SSDs.

“The pendulum has swung; there’s no looking back,” said Don Jeanette, a vice president at TrendFocus. “NVMe is now the dominant interface for all enterprise SSDs.” Nevertheless, SAS and SATA drives still account for more than a third of SSD exabytes shipped, he said.

Read more on Tech Target here.