What Is SATA Express and What are Its Applications?

As people have shifted to solid-state drives (SSDs) from hard drives, there is no coming back. Since they have been introduced it has changed the way for computer storage as these have greatly increased the efficiency of laptops and PCs. These have been the standard interface for easy installation between moving parts, that is computers and storage devices, thereby increasing the reading and writing speed and throughput. But the SATA interface has had a difficult time and reached its limits and it was the time to get on something faster. Accordingly, a new standard of communication comes in the form of SATA Express which helps communication between a computer and storage devices.

What is SATA Express? Everything about SATA Express

SATA Express is a new specification that blends Serial ATA and Peripheral Connect Interface Express or PCIe, thereby increasing the number of lanes along with a faster interface that will alleviate the SATA bottleneck for transferring data.

The existing SATA 3 has a specification that allows for bandwidth upto 6gbps or 600MB/S, which has been used back in the day. Though it can translate upto 750MB/s, with overhead and cabling it has been limited to 600MB/s. The SATA Express is the part of a SATA 3.2 specification, which allows the devices to pick the existing SATA method, ensuring backward compatibility with older devices, running with the help of faster PCIe bus. So basically, it supports both SATA and PCIe storage, meaning that if you plug in a SATA device you will be using just SATA and if you plug a PCIe device you will be using just running through PCIe. When you search “what is SATA express”, you will probably get pages after pages stating that, it is a different connector but it supports both the PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 standard, you will have the ability to have upto 16 Gbps of performance on PCIe gen 3.0 that is only 8Gbps per lane. And with PCIe Gen 2.0 you can have upto 10 gbps.

Another great thing about the SATA express is that these are backward compatible. What does backward compatible exactly means? To simply put, the standard is a 3.5 inch SATA data connector, if by any chance you don’t have that available, the two standard data ports can be connected to the device. Note that the end needs to be plugged into the power supply through a 15 pin SATA so that the SATA express can deliver power. Moreover, SATA express can also support various host controller interfaces. Apart from the usual support for Advanced Host Controller Interface, the SATA Express can very well support the Non-Volatile Memory Express as well.

The Uses of SATA Express:

The SATA Express interface has been in the market for a long time, but the reason that it didn’t catch the eye of users is because of the M.2 interface already existing and compatible with NVME. Though it can be exclusively used and it is expected to find its use in the desktop client environment. But the mobile computers already have the M.2 standard so the movement will be much slower.

The application is basically for the solid-state drives that use a smaller form factor. But when it comes to the flexibility it relies on the larger drives and uses the lanes of PCIe which means it is a bit slower. As it is an older interface it can be used to connect HDDs and optical drives which is not the case with other interfaces, all have a few limitations. Though the users think that the SATA Express is more targeted towards mobile PCs but by far these have benefited the non-mobile devices as well. 

The most notable feature it has is the DevSleep mode. That means, when the device is in sleep mode it reduces the power draw by also improving the run time when it is used again, usually by storing some data. It is still a popular connector as it has the newest components and compatibility which is very much required in the commercial market.