The short version
- PCIe can deliver up to 1GB/s per lane, compared with 0.6GB/s for SATA, and that gap only widened as PCIe generations rolled on.
- SATA-IO, the group behind the standard, chose not to build a 12Gb/s SATA. It standardized PCIe for client storage instead.
- A SATA SSD that does its job is still a sensible drive. What has ended is SATA as the place for fast storage, not SATA drives as useful hardware.
Why there was never a SATA IV
How-To Geek's Sydney Butler describes SATA III (2009) as the end of the line and asks why no successor appeared. SATA-IO's own SATA Express documentation answers that fairly directly.
Moving from 6Gb/s to 12Gb/s would not be simple, requiring significant changes to drive and host silicon. By contrast, PCIe was a mature technology that could scale by adding lanes. A SATA-IO presentation from 2013 goes further. It says two PCIe 3.0 lanes would offer 3.3x the performance of SATA and be 1.6x faster than a hypothetical SATA 12Gb/s, while consuming less power. The same deck states there was currently no plan to define SATA 12Gb/s.
A SATA-IO white paper, quoted by StorageSearch, adds a physical reason. Many backplanes and cables that worked fine at 6Gb/s wouldn't reliably carry data at 12Gb/s. In other words, the old connector was being asked to carry more than it was designed for.
So the "dead end" was a deliberate decision, not an oversight. Faster SATA was judged more expensive, more power-hungry and slower to ship than a move to PCIe.
SATA Express: the detour nobody took
The stopgap was SATA Express. It was a section of the SATA 3.2 specification defining host and device connectors that support either SATA or PCIe. It supported up to two PCIe lanes, or up to 2GB/s.
The hardware existed. Intel's Z97 and H97 chipsets arrived in May 2014 with support for it. But it never caught on. The connector was clumsy, and M.2 offered a neater route to the same PCIe lanes.
The 40MB/s story, with caveats
Butler's headline example is that SATA SSDs spent years chasing the same last 40MB/s. He compares the 2011 Samsung 830, rated at 520MB/s reads, with the 870 EVO at 560MB/s.
That comparison is fair as an illustration. Two caveats apply:
- These are manufacturer-rated maximums for two Samsung product lines, not independent measurements of every SATA drive.
- The 870 EVO launched in 2021. Treat it as a long-running product, not a 2026 breakthrough.
- 600MB/s is the raw link rate. Protocol commands and handshakes consume part of it, so applications never see the full figure. That is why drives plateau just below it.
Butler's claim of "near 15GB/s real-world speeds" for the best PCIe 5.0 drives is better read as a rated sequential maximum. Sustained, application-level speeds are usually lower. The core point holds regardless: a PCIe 3.0 drive like the 970 EVO Plus, at roughly 3.5GB/s, is already several times faster than any SATA drive.
M.2 is not the same as NVMe
The source says the preferred format today is M.2 using NVMe. That's broadly right, but the terms are easy to conflate, and it matters when you buy.
- M.2 is a connector and form factor.
- NVMe is a protocol that runs over PCIe.
- M.2 carries WiFi, WWAN, USB, PCIe and SATA, so an M.2 SSD can be SATA-based.
Before buying, check your motherboard or laptop manual for which M.2 modes each slot supports. A SATA M.2 drive in a PCIe-only slot won't work, and the reverse can fail as well. An M.2 slot alone doesn't guarantee compatibility.
Does SATA still hold up in real use?
Butler concludes that most games show little difference between NVMe and SATA. TechSpot's testing supports a more nuanced version. It used a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an RTX 5090 and 32GB of DDR5-6000, with the operating system on a separate drive.
Where SATA was fine:
- In Cyberpunk 2077, there was no noticeable difference in reload times between any SSDs, including SATA and USB models. Hard drives were far slower.
- Red Dead Redemption II showed no difference between any of the SSDs.
- In F1 25, SATA drives were only about 8% slower, which TechSpot called negligible.
Where SATA struggled:
- Black Myth: Wukong took 36% longer to load on one SATA drive than on a PCIe 3.0 SSD.
- The Last of Us Part II took at least 60% longer on SATA.
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart loaded in 1.3 seconds on PCIe, with SATA nearly five times slower. In the portal sequence, SATA lagged and the game visibly hung.
- Verifying the 150GB Stalker 2 took at least 38% longer on SATA SSDs.
- Moving games off a SATA drive could take at least five times longer than a PCIe-to-PCIe copy.
TechSpot's summary: SATA SSDs can still handle today's games but are showing their age. Some titles that load in seconds on PCIe can take two to four times longer on SATA. As more developers target near-instant loading, SATA risks slipping from fine to frustrating.
These timings come from one test system and a specific set of tasks. Treat them as directional, not universal. Tom's Hardware published a separate 11-game comparison in August 2026. Its Cyberpunk 2077 and Rift Apart findings point the same way: most normal gameplay uses little bandwidth, but specific streaming-heavy moments can expose SATA.
Price changes the calculus
The strongest argument against buying SATA today may be money rather than speed. TechSpot found the price advantage evaporating. In its examples, a 2TB TeamGroup Vulcan Z SATA SSD cost $92, against $107 for a PCIe 3.0 MP33. It noted a Samsung 990 Evo 2TB was cheaper than the 870 EVO at the time. At 8TB, the Samsung 870 QVO SATA drive was $730 on Newegg, while the WD Black SN850X PCIe 4.0 was $600. These were prices at the time of TechSpot's testing and will have moved since.
TechSpot also cautioned against overspending in the other direction. Moving from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 5.0 often gives no in-game benefit, and PCIe 5.0 drives cost at least 40% more than PCIe 4.0 models.
What to do with your drives
- Already own a working SATA SSD? Keep it. If it's your boot drive and the PC feels fine, replacing it is unlikely to change daily use.
- Buying new for a modern PC? Choose NVMe. The price gap is small or reversed, and you get headroom for large transfers.
- Still on a hard drive? Upgrade to any SSD first. That is the big jump, and it is where both TechSpot and Butler agree.
- Need bulk or secondary storage? SATA SSDs and hard drives still make sense for archives, backups and older systems with free 2.5-inch bays.
- Move large files often? Look at SLC cache size, NAND type and sustained write speeds, not just the sequential rating. TechSpot found cache size changed copy times noticeably.
The verdict
Butler's title is deliberately provocative, but his closing point is the right one: retire the era, keep the drive. SATA is a dead end as an interface because PCIe scales further, costs less power per bit of throughput and no longer carries a price penalty. SATA SSDs are not a failure. They were the upgrade that made a generation of PCs feel new, and the good ones will keep doing that until they wear out.
For anyone building or buying now, there is little reason to choose SATA for a primary drive. For anyone already running one, there is little reason to panic.