SATA Express

SATA Express (sometimes unofficially shortened to SATAe) is a computer bus interface that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, initially standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification. The SATA Express connector used on the host side is backward compatible with the standard SATA data connector, while it also provides two PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device. Instead of continuing with the SATA interface's usual approach of doubling its native speed with each major version, SATA 3.2 specification included the PCI Express bus for achieving data transfer speeds greater than the SATA 3.0 speed limit of 6 Gbit/s. Designers of the SATA interface concluded that doubling the native SATA speed would take too much time to catch up with the advancements in solid-state drive (SSD) technology, would require too many changes to the SATA standard, and would result in a much greater power consumption compared with the existing PCI Express bus. As a widely adopted computer bus, PCI Express provides sufficient bandwidth while allowing easy scaling up by using faster or additional lanes. In addition to supporting legacy Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) at the logical interface level, SATA Express also supports NVM Express (NVMe) as the logical device interface for attached PCI Express storage devices. While the support for AHCI ensures software-level backward compatibility with legacy SATA devices and legacy operating systems, NVM Express is designed to fully utilize high-speed PCI Express storage devices by leveraging their capability of executing many I/O operations in parallel.

History

The Serial ATA (SATA) interface was designed primarily for interfacing with hard disk drives (HDDs), doubling its native speed with each major revision: maximum SATA transfer speeds went from 1.5 Gbit/s in SATA 1.0 (standardized in 2003), through 3 Gbit/s in SATA 2.0 (standardized in 2004), to 6 Gbit/s as provided by SATA 3.0 (standardized in 2009). SATA has also been selected as the interface for gradually more adopted solid-state drives (SSDs), but the need for a faster interface became apparent as the speed of SSDs and hybrid drives increased over time. As an example, some SSDs available in early 2009 were already well over the capabilities of SATA 1.0 and close to the SATA 2.0 maximum transfer speed, while in the second half of 2013 high-end consumer SSDs had already reached the SATA 3.0 speed limit, requiring an even faster interface. While evaluating different approaches to the required speed increase, designers of the SATA interface concluded that extending the SATA interface so it doubles its native speed to 12 Gbit/s would require more than two years, making that approach unsuitable for catching up with advancements in SSD technology. At the same time, increasing the native SATA speed to 12 Gbit/s would require too many changes to the SATA standard, ending up in a more costly and less power efficient solution compared with the already available and widely adopted PCI Express bus. Thus, PCI Express was selected by the designers of SATA interface, as part of the SATA 3.2 revision that was standardized in 2013; extending the SATA specification to also provide a PCI Express interface within the same backward-compatible connector allowed much faster speeds by reusing already existing technology. Some vendors also use proprietary logical interfaces for their flash-based storage products, connected through the PCI Express bus. Such storage products can use a multi-lane PCI Express link, while interfacing with the operating system through proprietary drivers and host interfaces. Moreover, as of June 2014 there are similar storage products using NVM Express as the non-proprietary logical interface for a PCI Express add-on card.

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