Why did SATA Express never catch on?

[NickLund]

So I was discussing stuff like 3D XPoint and the Z-SSDs with a friend recently, and she brought up SATA Express, which made me wonder about the topic of this thread. Why has SATA Express never caught on? I haven't seen a single SATA Express SSD, even though almost all new motherboards support it. Did PCIe/M.2 drives kill it? Was it just not a big enough of an upgrade? Is it too clunky?

 

What do you guys think?

[TheRandomness]

Ever heard of U.2? Sata express had a U.2 connector on the device end iirc. 

[manikyath]

i guess it comes down to there being better platforms for high speed SSDs (m.2, pcie, etc.) and the connector just being a hack job in all honestly making it a less popular platform for hardware manufacturers to choose.

[Sakkura]

It's too limited of a market, why make a SATA Express SSD that can only be used in desktops, when you could instead make an M.2 SSD that can be used in laptops too? Also, M.2 supports up to 4 PCIe lanes where SATA Express is limited to 2. Even worse, the initial implementation of SATA Express only ran PCIe 2.0.

[NikWillOrStuff]

I imagine part of the reason is this is the connector for it...