SATA Express and M.2 connectors are no longer a rare sight on the latest generation of motherboards. The PC ecosystem appears to be ready for the PCI-Express SSD revolution. Will 2015 be the year of PCI-Express SSDs?

Those who keep an eye on Hardware.Info's SSD reviews (click here for our latest big SSD round-up) will as of late mainly encounter charts in which SSDs from the high-end segment exhibit nearly identical performance. Especially for sequential read and write tests, we're consistently producing charts in which nearly all modern SSDs achieve speeds of about 550 MB/s. This is no coincidence, as this 550 MB/s value is the maximum real world throughput of the Serial ATA 600 interface that is used by nearly all SSDs. Back when we were only dealing with mechanical hard drives, we didn't even dare dream about it, but SATA600's maximum theoretical throughput of 600 MB/s has been the main bottleneck that limits SSD performance for quite some time now.