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NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Express) A standard hardware interface for solid state drives (SSDs) that uses the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. Introduced in 2011 by the NVM Express group (www.nvmexpress.org), NVMe takes advantage of the parallel I/O of the PCIe bus and the low latency of SSDs. It supports speeds up to six times faster than SATA-based SSDs and 10 times faster than hard drives and is especially noticeable when reading and writing large files. See NVMe over Fabrics.
Via PCIe, M.2 and U.2
Connecting to the computer over PCIe, NVMe SSDs are available in three form factors: a PCI Express card, the small M.2 card and U.2, the latter supporting the traditional 2.5" and 3.5" drive sizes (see U.2). See PCI Express, M.2, SATA and SSD.
Stack Up More Commands
One of the salient features in NVMe compared to SATA is the dramatic increase in the number of commands that can be queued (see NCQ).
|NVMe on an M.2 Card|
|Nearly a terabyte of SSD storage (960GB) is contained on this 80x20mm M.2 card (pen is for size comparison). By 2020, NVMe SSDs reached eight terabytes (8TB). See M.2.|
|NVMe M.2 on the Motherboard|
|Modern desktop PC motherboards have dedicated M.2 slots as in this Asus example. This is looking down between the graphics card and heat sink.|
|NVMe is the controller protocol. PCIe is the pathway, and M.2 is the form factor. See PCI Express and M.2.|
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