NVMe drives are the fastest types of SSDs on the market. Depending on the manufacturer, they can deliver transfer speeds of five to six times faster than SATA-based SSDs.
NVMe is a non-volatile storage interface that connects to the CPU directly via PCIe lanes. It is a highly scalable and high-performance storage protocol for both NAND flash and Persistent Memory technologies (such as SATA SSDs).
The NVMe specification was developed from the ground up for use with NAND and Persistent Memory technology and provides a number of unique features that help improve performance, increase capacity, and reduce latency in compute intensive data ecosystems. The resulting solution is optimized for data starved systems that must handle exponentially more data, while still supporting existing workloads and new applications.
Unlike early PCIe-based SSDs that relied on proprietary firmware to achieve their performance goals, NVMe is a fully-featured, industry standard and enterprise enabled specification. It offers more efficient host controller software, better scalability and lower cost of ownership. It also delivers superior value-add features for a wide range of enterprise application requirements, such as scatter/gather IOs that minimize CPU overhead on data transfers and provide the ability to change queue priorities.
This allows the NVMe controller to create multiple queues based on system configuration and workload requirements, which enables it to perform data reads and writes more quickly than legacy storage protocols like SAS or SATA can. This feature is crucial for enterprise workloads that require very fast sequential read and write speed, as well as for machine learning, artificial intelligence, real-time analytics, and DevOps environments.
NVMe can also provide higher capacity than traditional SSDs by using multi-level cell (MLC) or TLC NAND flash as the primary storage medium. This means that an NVMe drive can have a larger storage capacity than a SATA drive, which is useful for gaming and other uses that require large file transfers.
Despite these benefits, the NVMe specification does have its drawbacks. For example, most NVMe drives can only reach 2000 MB/s peak throughput due to limitations in the NVMe protocol and the number of available lanes on the PCIe interface. This means that the maximum possible throughput on an NVMe drive is only about three-quarters of what it could be if it were connected to an older computer with a PCI Express 2.0 interface.
Even though NVMe drives do achieve a much greater throughput than SATA SSDs, they still are more expensive and offer fewer storage capacities. This makes them less suited to consumer applications than SATA-based SSDs, which are more popular in notebooks and desktop computers.
NVMe drives are also available in the M.2 form factor, which is a smaller, 2.5” drive with an NVMe connector that was developed by Intel in 2014. These drives can be used in laptops and desktops as well.
There are many different types of NVMe drives on the market, including SATA SSDs and PCIe-based SSDs. Typically, SATA-based SSDs are more affordable and are suited for gaming or other light computing applications. However, an NVMe-based drive can be a worthwhile investment if you need high sequential read and write speeds or plan on doing any heavy computational work.