Although vendors are focusing on M.2 and NVMe capable SSDs lately the SATA drives are still the cash cow and actually affordable to the masses. Apart from that M.2 drives require up to four PCIe lanes, of which there aren’t too many, which make the SATA drives interesting to use as mass storage.

With their new 88SS1079 SSD controller Marvell offers an upgraded version of their 88SS1074 controller which has been used in popular units like Crucial MX300 or the Sandisk X400 (WD Blue).

On the 88SS1079 components that used to be mounted on the PCB have been moved into the controller itself. This allows for a smaller footprint and helps to further reduce production cost. Especially in combination with 3D NAND we might see a wave of new affordable drives, which are based on this controller.





Source: Overclock3D