Pick up an mPCIe card and mSATA card and you’d be forgiven for thinking these are the same format. Possessing an identical interface and dimensions, an mSATA card can look like an mPCIe card and even fit in the same slot—but looks can be deceiving.
While they share the same physical specifications and even fit into the same connectors, mPCIe and mSATA are electrically different. Both are miniature peripheral cards made for expanding system capability based on a similar physical card and connector. However, mPCIe utilizes the same PCI Express signals used by desktop expansion cards (e.g., graphics adapters), while mSATA uses the SATA storage interface employed by SSDs and hard drives
(Figs. 1 and 2).
To understand these two miniature-card formats, let’s take a brief look at their full-size counterparts:
PCI Express: An expansion interface for desktop computers and servers, PCI Express uses serial connectivity for higher speeds and lower pin counts than its predecessor PCI. Instead of PCI’s parallel bus architecture, PCI Express leverages point-to-point topology. Each serial link consists of a full duplex pair of differential signals, known as a lane, between two endpoints. This design makes PCI Express highly performance-scalable, with up to 32 lanes possible for speeds up to 1064 MB/s.
SATA: SATA is a bus interface that connects host systems with storage devices using a serial link. As a serial update to PATA, SATA boasts higher speeds, lower profile connectors, and cables for better system airflow, as well as an improved feature set. SATA host controllers support native command queuing through AHCI and RAID as well as legacy IDE mode. Like PCIe, SATA uses serial communication with differential signaling to achieve speeds up to 6Gbps with SATA III and has lower pin counts compared to legacy PATA.
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