Linux

Great comment!

Note that @ptz is using bits per second, so divide everything by 8 to get GB.

And, SATA is even slower than NVMe, which is increasingly common, especially in smaller form factors. So, you're looking at a potential Gen 5 NVMe 128Gbps vs USB's - let's say a USBC drive capable of handling Gen 4's maximum speed of 40Gbps. The number of Gen 4 devices - peripherals or hosts - is rather sparse. Thunderbolt 5 has been announced and will bump bandwidth to 80Gbps, but the earliest possible time we'll see those is sometime this year, and it'll be a few years before they're wide spread and peripherals are common. And if we consider the future, NVMe Gen 6 & 7 have speeds up to 256 and 512Gbps, respectively.

There's also the consideration that M.2 adoption tends to move faster than USB, so while computers are still being sold with USB 2 ports, and a maybe one or two v3, it's still pretty rare to find ones that include USB4 despite it being ratified in 2020. But as soon an a new NVMe generation is released, you start seeing more rapid adoption. I don't know why.

I'm bitter about how slowly the industry has been moving on USB4. For average users, NVMe speeds are already plenty fast - faster is better, of course, but USB3 is still laggy. Gen4, I think, is "fast enough" for most uses; it's fast enough that most people won't notice how much slower than M.2 (NMVe or SATA) it is. But it's so damned rare, and Gen4 docks are still absurdly expensive compared to Gen3 docks.