SSD manufacturers have rapidly run into a tricky problem - namely the SATA 6Gbps interface. The rapid advances in NAND and controller tech must have surprised the most optimistic of SSD designers, and while old Lucifer himself will be limbering up for the final reckoning before the performance of spinning disks threaten the 6Gbps interface, some mainstream SSDs are close to flooding the interface right now. High-performance drives are bumping their heads on the SATA ceiling, so what's a manufacturer to do? Well, there are a couple of options, both of which are based around the PCIe bus of the motherboard. There is the hybrid of SATA and PCIe, unimaginatively called the SATA Express interface, which probably won't see commercial sampling until around 2014 at the earliest. It's only just begun its road to ratification by the SATA-IO (the Serial ATA International Organisation), but SATA Express is specified to deliver up to 1GB/s via PCIe 2.0, or up to 2GB/s using PCIe 3.0. The interface also has the promise of delivering up to 16GB/s in the future. The other option, and the one that KingSpec has used to great effect before, is to build a drive on a PCB that fits into an existing PCIe slot on your motherboard. OCZ has also been using this method for quite a while with its RevoDrive and RevoDrive X2 drives (now in their third generation), which are aimed primarily at the workstation market using a PCIe x4 connection. Its Z-Drive and VeloDrive ranges are targeted at the enterprise
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