Earlier this year, we gave an overview of the then-current state of the enthusiast SSD market, as well as some predictions on where things appeared to be headed. The last 7 months have seen no shortage of exciting announcements, and the enthusiast market has rapidly evolved in both positive and confusing ways. Let’s get up to speed on U.2, NVMe, 3D XPoint, M&A, and the rest of the alphabet and buzzword soup that make up this market.
A Note on Terminology
There has been a lot of new terminology in the SSD world, and it can get easily muddled. In the interest of clarity and consistency, we’ll use the following conventions when referring to categories of technology:
Form Factor: the physical footprint/size and shape of a drive (e.g., add-in card, M.2 stick, or 2.5" drive)
Interface: the bus used to connect an SSD to a host (e.g., SATA or PCI Express)
Protocol: the communication standard used to communicate across an interface (e.g., NVMe or AHCI)
Connector: the physical connector of a drive to a cable or socket (e.g., standard SATA connector, the PCIe 3.0 x4 edge connector, U.2/SFF-8639, M.2 connector keys)
Well, Hello to U.2.
Source: [H]ardocp