Stefan Mileschin

One of the next big things in motherboard development is the progressive move to faster storage – the superseding of SATA 3 Gbps and SATA 6 Gbps. We already have PCIe cards; however these tend to be bulky and/or expensive for all but enthusiasts. There is the RAID route, which comes with potential pitfalls of its own. Other than this, we are waiting for the SATA Express revolution to take hold, either in the form of AHCI enabled hardware or NVMe. On the motherboard, this means we need the M.2 (formerly NGFF) standard to be prevalent: we have seen it so far on the ASUS ROG line with mPCIe Combo II enabled motherboards, where it uses a PCIe 2.0 x1 lane from the PCH to connect to the system. ASRock are now preparing to release an AMD AM3+ motherboard based on the 990FX chipset with access to PCIe 2.0 x2, direct from the CPU, which should be suitable for 10 Gb/s peak speed (this around 1 GB/s) in SATA Express mode and SATA 6Gb/s in SATA mode.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7580/a...rboard-with-m2