SATA Express

SATA Express (an abbreviation for Serial ATA Express and sometimes an unofficial abbreviation for SATAe ) is a computer bus interface that supports Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, originally standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification.

Instead of continuing the usual SATA interface approach of doubling its own speed with each new (major) version, the SATA 3.2 specification includes a PCI Express bus to achieve data transfer speeds exceeding the SATA 3.0 speed limit of 6 Gb / s.

The developers of the SATA interface concluded that doubling the native SATA speed would take too long to catch up with advances in solid-state drive (SSD) technology, would require too many changes in the SATA standard and would result in much greater power consumption compared to the existing PCI Express bus. As a widespread computer bus, PCI Express provides sufficient bandwidth, and can be easily scaled with faster or additional lines.

In addition to supporting the legacy Logical Interface Advanced Host Controller (AHCI), SATA Express also supports NVM Express (NVMe) as a logical device interface for connected PCI Express storage devices. Although AHCI support provides backward compatibility at the software level with legacy SATA devices and legacy operating systems , NVM Express is designed to take full advantage of high-speed PCI Express storage devices, leveraging their ability to perform many I / O operations in parallel .