It’s fair to say the SATA-based SSD sector has now become quite a stagnant marketplace. Performance has hit its peak and plateaued – while this has meant that prices have plummeted, the arena has seen very little innovation and excitement in the last 3-4 years. With the introduction of Intel Z170 this Summer and full compatibility with M.2 and NVM Express this game is about to change. NVMe uses lower latency and can handle up to 64K queues and up 64K commands each while SATA and AHCI can only handle 1 queue and 32 commands each.
