Micron RealSSD P320h PCI Express SSD Review - Native Speed

We've often spoken about the future of SSD technology eventually evolving away from "bridged" interfaces like SATA and SAS, to direct-attached, native interfaces like PCI Express. It just makes sense. With the ultra-fast random access times and high IO bandwidth of solid state storage, it's not the storage media itself that's the limiting factor, rather, non-native interfaces get in the way and become the bottleneck. A SAS or SATA controller still has to have its protocol translated over to PCIe so the host can talk to it, which wastes precious bandwidth and adds latency.

Most of the PCIe SSD cards on the market today, with the exception of products from Fusion-io, still rely on SATA or SAS-based NAND controllers to interface on the backend of the device to the NAND array. PCIe cards from OCZ, Intel, LSI and others use controllers from LSI SandForce or the like. Fusion-io was the first company to introduce a true native PCI Express to NAND Flash controller-processor employed in their products, though Micron has also been cooking up their own native PCIe SSD technology for some time now.