NVME SSDS: Everything You Need To Know About This Insanely Fast Storage

THE NEW WAVE OF MEMORYBASED STORAGE BLOWS AWAY THE OLDER GENERATIONS.

- Jon L. Jacobi

NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is no longer a nice-to-have storage technology. If you’re shopping for a new PC, it’s a feature you should actively seek out. Moreover, if your PC is of fairly recent vintage, you should upgrade to NVMe. Here’s why.

NVMe is a communications standard/ protocol developed specially for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, Dell, and Seagate. It operates across the PCIe bus (hence the Express in the name), which allows the drives to act more like the fast memory that they are, rather than the hard disks they imitate. Bottom line: NVMe is fast. Really fast. Like never-have-towait-again-for-your-computer fast.

NVME: IT’S THE STORAGE, STUPID

Not to belittle the efforts of CPU and GPU vendors over the last decade, but the reason the latest top-end PCs seem so much faster is because of the quantum leap in storage performance provided by SSDs. Storage was the last bottleneck for real and perceived performance, but it’s now wide-pour with a vengeance.

If you’ve bought, say, a MacBook Pro in the last two years, you may have noticed that you hardly wait at all anymore for mundane operations. Programs pop open, files load and save in an instant, and the machine boots and shuts down in just a few seconds.

That’s because the NVMe SSD inside the latest MacBook Pro reads and writes data literally four times faster than the SATA SSDs found in previous generations. Not only that, but it locates them 10 times as fast (seek). That’s on top of the four- to five-fold improvement in throughput and ten-fold improvement in seek times already provided by SATA SSDs (over hard drives).

The approximate performance ceilings for the three mainstream storage technologies as things now stand are: