As Anandtech has reported on in the past, the SATA standard has failed to keep up to date in both maximum bandwidth and form factor. This led to situations like the Macbook Air and its proprietary PCIe SSD and the earlier Toshiba Blade SSD variations that made aftermarket repairs and upgrades of these systems difficult and expensive.

Enter the SATA IO and revision 3.2:

• SATA Express (PCIe 3.0 @ 2GB/s)
• M.2 (Sub-2.5″ HDD form factor)
• USM Slim (Even smaller form factor standard)
• DevSleep (Power management for improved battery life)

Hurray international standards organizations. Now to encourage all of the companies that struck out on their own to come back to an industry standard storage drive.