NVMe is no longer a nice storage technology to have – if you’re shopping for a new PC, it’s a feature you should actively seek out. Also, if your PC is a fairly recent vintage, you should upgrade to NVMe. Here’s why.
What is NVMe
NVMe is a communications standard developed specifically for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Dell and Seagate. It runs on the PCIe bus (hence the “Express” in the name), allowing the drives to act more like the fast memory they are, rather than the hard drives they mimic. Conclusion: NVMe is fast. Very fast. Like never having to wait for your computer again.
NVMe SSD Quick Hits
If you’re already familiar with NVMe, here are our quick recommendations for NVMe SSDs:
Best premium NVMe SSD: Samsung 970 Pro M.2 [amazon.com]
Best NVMe SSD for most people: Western Digital Black SN750 [amazon.com]
Best budget NVMe SSD: Adata XPG SX8200 Pro [amazon.com]
Check out our roundup of the best SSDs for more details on these and other choices.
Removing storage as a bottleneck
Unintentionally minimizing the efforts of CPU and GPU vendors over the past decade, but the reason the latest high-end PCs seem so much faster is due to the leap in storage performance provided by SSDs, first SATA, and now NVMe. Storage was the last real and perceived performance bottleneck, but it’s now spilled over with a vengeance.
If you’ve purchased, say, a MacBook Pro, within the last couple of years, you may have noticed that you’re no longer waiting for the mundane operations at all. Programs open, files load and save in an instant, and the machine boots up and shuts down in seconds.
In fact, the NVMe SSD in the latest MacBook Pro reads and writes data literally four times faster than previous generation SATA SSDs. Not only that, but it locates them 10 times faster (search). This is on top of the four to five-fold increase in throughput and ten-fold increase in seek times already delivered by SATA SSDs compared to HDDs.
The approximate performance caps for the three common storage technologies as things stand today are:
sustained throughputIDG
Not that you need sustained throughput like this very often, but NVMe makes it easy to transfer files of any size. HDD=200MB/s, SATA SSD=550MB/s, NVMe SSD=3GB/s. Longer bars are better.
hours of IDG research
The development curve of CPU and GPU pales in comparison to that of storage over the past 10 years. HD = 2-5 millisecond search, SATA SSD = 0.2 millisecond search, NVMe SSD = 0.02 millisecond search. Shorter bars are better, but that’s an overall average. Some records in each category may do better, others not so well.
Hard drives still offer great value for money in terms of capacity and are great for less-used data. But for your operating system, programs, and often-used data, you want an NVMe SSD if your system supports it, or a SATA SSD if it can’t.
SATA SSD vs NVMe SSD
Knowing well the ultimate performance potential of NAND-based SSDs, even when they first appeared, it was clear to the industry that a new bus and a new protocol may be required. But, since early SSDs were relatively slow (and bulky), it turned out to be much more convenient to use existing SATA storage infrastructure.
Although the SATA bus has evolved to 16 Gbps from version 3.3, almost all commercial implementations remain at 6 Gbps (about 550 Mbps after communication overhead). Even version 3.3 is much slower than current SSD technology is capable of, especially in RAID configurations.
expro m2 nvme 3d ss