The SATA 6Gb/s standard, along with the AHCI protocol, has long been a bottleneck when it comes to building and deploying fast SSDs. With SSDs in the compact and very fast M.2 standard, which includes a SATA 6Gb/s data line for compatibility reasons but typically uses the significantly faster PCI-Express lines – four of them – this limitation has been lifted. While the gross data rate for SATA is capped at a maximum of 600 MB/s, with about 550 MB/s being the actual usable throughput, four PCIe 2.0 lanes already provide a gross rate of 1,000 MB/s, and current motherboards with PCIe 3.0 can achieve almost 2,000 MB/s – more than three times that of the fastest SATA standard. Additionally, using an NVMe SSD provides a speed boost from the protocol, which, however, only operates over PCIe and not over SATA.