Is M.2 here to stay or 4 gen from now will have nothing to do with it

[cooldex]

So i brought a 256gb m.2 ssd nvme, and spent 100$ but already out of space but luckily i still have my 1tb hdd its full now but i still have it from my previous laptop (m6500), well i had a few 2.5in drives but my new (7710) can only fit one and now been replaced by 2 m.2 slots, with one left, so wondering if i should buy another m.2 ssd, but 1tb is 400$ and 2tb is 1200$, so will that be money down the drain (like who ever brought a msata drive, which lasted about 5yrs or so) and i won't upgrade till they have 8 core laptop cpu's and 16 threads, and a mxm slot. Or do they plan on making 8Tb m.2 ssd's

 

[Solandri]

mSATA wasn't really a planned standard. A bunch of vendors wanted a smaller SATA connector. So they took the mini-PCIe connector used for WiFi cards, and rewired it to SATA (yes, the two connectors are the same). Enough of them did it that SSD manufacturers started to support the form factor.

M.2 is planned (some would say over-planned - it supports cards which are 12, 16, 22 and 30 mm by 16, 26, 30, 38, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm). Aside from a bad decision earlier to allow vendors to use it for SATA which caused and still causes a lot of confusion, it's gained pretty wide acceptance. It's used for SSDs, cache SSDs, WiFi cards, and cellular cards. The only real drawback right now is that it's limited to PCIe x4. I imagine they'll amend the standard to allow more PCIe lanes, while retaining backwards compatibility.