SSDs or Solid State Storage Drives are an important evolution in storage technology that has almost replaced rotational drives both in capacity and speed. And while costs have come down there is still some question as to what the final interface will be. Rotational drives started on IDE and later migrated to SATA which really improved performance. The first SSDs used SATA connections and while SATA drives currently dominate the market they are not as efficient as they could be.

New drive interfaces such as M.2 and NVMe can increase data performance but adoption of these has been slow due to availability and compatible motherboards.

I have reviewed a couple of M.2 based SSDs in the past and was very impressed with how fast the drives were compared to standard SATA SSDs. Thing was, I noticed that these drives were fast with read performance (which is what most enthusiasts care about) and slow enough on writes that SATA based SSDs were often faster.