Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-05-09, 19:16:

I'm not trying to derail the thread or diminish the value what is being discussed, but I think as long as SATA drives exist there won't be much of a reason to go with anything else for retro PCs. Even on modern systems there is hardly any perceptible difference between a decent SATA drive and an NVMe in average consumer workloads, despite the big difference in benchmark numbers.

Sata generally performs best for all PIO and UDMA retro computer uses, I agree, especially if you can enable block mode transfers. Seems like there is a gap for the ATA-2 / ATA-3 period, that is late socket 3 through early slot 1, when WDMA was the best transfer mode. Even though it's listed in the Jmicron and Marvell specs, I have not been able to make WDMA work over a PATA-SATA bridge, even though PIO and UDMA work fine. So there's a spot where legacy, CF, and SD storage can make a good case for itself.

This discussion also got me looking into Sata Express. Looks like an interesting effort that failed to get market penetration and made sata a legacy standard.

I'm still amazed that the linux boot loader was able to get the NVMe to be presented as ATA over PCI, even if it is extremely slow. I feel like there's still a piece to that puzzle that I don't understand.