Storage Renaissance

Just in case you haven’t been watching the technical details of several recent hardware releases, there’s a revolution underway in storage.  A good example is the just-updated Apple 15” Retina MacBook Pro, in which the PCIe-based SSD is two-and-a-half times faster than in previous models (see MacRumors article).  The updates to the 13” MacBook Air and 13” Retina MacBook Pro also made leaps in SSD performance, but not quite to this degree.  This major step in storage capability is due to moving from the long-running SATA host bus interface (which is limited to data rates of 6GB/s) to PCIe, which in version 3.0 can move information many times faster.  Couple that with another emerging host interface specification called NVMe and there’s still more to come.  (If you really thirst for arcane details on these geek subjects look here.)  On the Windows computer side, Windows 10 is due this summer and no doubt many manufacturers will use the opportunity to launch new machines running the new software.  Also, later this year Intel’s Skylake processors are due, followed by another wave of new hardware.  If I were in the market for a new laptop I’d probably wait a few months and see what happens when all these advancements are combined.