What Is NVMe and How Does It Improve SSD Technology?

J.P. Pressley is a contributing writer to BizTech magazine and editor at Manifest.

Over the past few years, storage technology has slowly transitioned to non-volatile memory express technology, and for good reason. Providing exceptional speed in a compact form — the most popular form of NVMe is roughly the size of a stick of gum — NVMe delivers the highest throughput and quickest response times yet for all sorts of enterprise workloads. That’s part of why they’re broadly being implemented by Dell, IBM, HPE and other technology giants.

Still, while NVMe drives are included with most laptops and many desktops and are making inroads into the server room, they aren’t entirely the norm yet. It’s just as easy to buy a device featuring a serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drive as it is to buy one with an NVMe drive. So, when it comes to choosing which technology to invest in, it’s important to have a basic understanding of NVMe and its storage interconnectivity capabilities.

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Introduced by the NVM Express group in 2011, NVMe is now a standard hardware interface for solid-state drives (SSDs) that uses the peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) bus, a switched architecture connecting peripheral devices such as storage drives and graphics cards. The “non-volatile” in NVMe refers to the fact that the storage doesn’t get erased when the computer reboots, while the “express” refers to how the storage data travels across the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PCIe on the computer’s motherboard.

By providing a more direct connection with a computer’s motherboard than SATA and other storage technologies, NVMe unlocks tremendous bandwidth potential for storage devices, making it an effective and ideal new standard for all types of enterprise workloads.

SSDs have long been the gold standard of fast storage mediums. NVMe isn’t a replacement for them; it’s a technology that helps SSDs run even faster and with increased efficiency, performance and operability across a broad range of systems via the PCIe bus it uses.

When it comes to storage technology, NVMe is a relatively newer interface that was created solely for use in SSDs, as opposed to hard disk drives (HDDs) with flash technology. It is designed to communicate directly with a system’s CPU, eliminating the need for a tech middleman. It is also designed specifically to maximize the potential of the parallel and low-latency data paths inherent in flash-based storage devices. In fact, NVMe can hold and send roughly 64,000 commands per queue without any hiccups, far more than the respective 254 and 32 commands per queue that Legacy SAS and SATA can support.

Overall, designed for high performance and non-volatile storage media, NVMe is the only storage protocol that helps SSDs achieve maximum throughput. It’s also a highly scalable protocol that can be extended to work with persistent memory technologies, including those not yet available on the market.

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NVMe has become mainstream thanks to its ability to significantly improve the speed and performance of data storage. But that’s not because NVMe is faster at operating in the same way other protocols do; it’s because NVMe operates entirely differently. NVMe is a unique hardware interface with unique speed and performance-improving benefits, including:

NVMe’s benefits make the hardware interface an ideal technology for a wide range of business applications, from high-performance computing to data centers and cloud storage. That’s why it’s been overtaking SATA as the standard for high-functioning storage technology.

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At their cores, NVMe and SATA are both protocols used for connecting storage devices to a computer. But that’s where their similarities end. NVMe and SATA have some key differences in design and performance, including:

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Overall, the differences in NVMe and SATA stem from their design: NVMe is specifically tailored for SSDs, while SATA isn’t. In essence, SSDs are the race car to traditional HDDs’ minivan, and NVMe is the racetrack to SATA’s common road: Any car can try driving on any road, but a race car on a racetrack can realize a potential it could not on a common road, and that no minivan could realize on any road.

Helping speed up and improve the efficiency of all storage matters, NVMe has a lot of business-specific use cases, including high-performance computing environments — scientific research and financial modeling are two examples — where speedy data access is critical. It’s also being used in data centers to improve the cross-departmental performance of enterprise storage systems, providing employees with faster access to data and heightened system responsiveness.

Beyond the more tried-and-true traditional storage situations, NVMe is also able to help prepare business networks to handle artificial intelligence applications. After all, AI, machine learning and neural networks all require high amounts of storage — so much that performance can be slowed and crashes could result without the right storage protocol in place.

In the end, between real-time customer interactions, video editing, virtualization environments and more, NVMe can be used in any storage-related situation. By helping bolster your system’s storage capabilities, the SSD hardware interface will help your team execute their given tasks in a faster, more efficient manner.