Great news for users with PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs on April 21, 2021, 13:38 Why it matters: Microsoft during its recent Game Stack Live (GSL) 2021 event confirmed that its upcoming DirectStorage API for the PC will be compatible with PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs. That's important considering PCIe 3.0 drives are much more plentiful than their newer counterparts and PCIe 4.0 drives are limited to just a handful of newer platforms. Up to this point, it was widely assumed that the tech would only work with the latest PCIe 4.0 drives. The tech won’t work with SATA drives, however, as that interface is simply too slow to achieve what Microsoft wants to accomplish.