NVME SSD - Why Everyone Is Crazy About This Storage Technology

Hi Everyone! It's your favorite tech teacher/review guy - John! Today I wanted to discuss with you a storage technology that has taken over the industry in many ways.

  

 NVME Links to an external site. is the latest protocol that can interface with the PCI bus to achieve speeds much faster than traditional protocols like AHCI. Links to an external site. NVME is much faster than any other traditional storage technology. Most SATA based storage is limited to about 500 MegaBytes per second, whereas some NVME SSD drives have been known to write way paste 5000 MegaBytes per second. NVME utlizes NAND flash memory Links to an external site. to achieve these speeds.

 

Compared to traditional storage, like IDE, SATA, or even SAS hard drives, NVME is much faster. It's not the protocol or interface that makes NVME faster, it's really just the memory we mentioned earlier, the flash. The flash memory can be accessed almost instantly, instead of waiting for a spinning disk and arm to read the bits. The flash memory is the core of NVME's speed. All of the other new features that came with NVME, like the protocol, are really just symptoms of needing a faster protocol to handle the faster flash memory. A great example of needing a new protocol is traditional SATA SSDs. These SSDS saturated the bandwidth of SATA3, the memory could be read/written to faster, but the interface and protocols could not keep up. This is why a new protocol was created.

 

As of 2021, there are thousands of these drives out. They come in different shapes (for example m.2 socket) and sizes (for example  2230 or 2280). It can get very confusing very quickly if you are shopping around. Here's a quick link where you can find some of the best nvme ssd Links to an external site. of 2021 and review their performance benchmarks. As you read the review of the SSD drives, make note of their speeds, how they are different, how they are similar. Then go through the basic 5 question quiz in the module.