14 DAY TRIAL // The Serial ATA International Organization has just announced that it's working on developing a new industry standard, dubbed SATA Express, that combines the strengths of the SATA and PCI Express interfaces in order to enable fast storage devices to reach transfer speeds up to 16Gb/s.
SATA Express will come in two versions offering interface speeds of 8Gb/s and 16Gb/s, an important improvement over the 6Gbps of the fastest SATA standard available today.
However, despite the increased transfer speeds achieved, the connectors used by this interface will be compatible with those used by regular SATA drives.
This way, blazing fast solid state drives can use the SATA Express interface, while hard drives and other slower storage devices will rely on the regular SATA standard for data transfers.
Internally, SATA Express uses a four lanes PCI-Express 1.1 link with SATA's own encoding scheme to deliver the 16Gb/s transfer speeds advertised by SATA-IO.
“The SATA Express specification provides SSD and hybrid drive manufacturers the advantages of performance and scalability enabled by PCIe 3.0 – which is available now – and the ubiquity of SATA,” said Mladen Luksic, SATA-IO president.
“We expect the SATA Express specification to be completed by the end of 2011,” concluded the organization's president.
SATA Express is designed as a low-cost interface, so expect it to start arriving in motherboard beginning with 2012.
The announcement of the SATA Express standard comes in a time when PCI Express solid state drives have started to gain more and more momentum in the enterprise market.
Together with SATA Express, the SATA-IO organization has also announced the introduction of the SATA µSSD standard for embedded, single-chip storage solutions. This connects directly to the motherboard and targets mobile devices.