Overview
NVMe is a protocol designed specifically for high-speed flash storage (SSDs). Unlike the older SATA protocol, which was designed for spinning hard drives, NVMe leverages the high-speed PCIe bus to provide massive performance gains.
Key Benefits
- Low Latency: Reduces the overhead of the storage stack.
- High Throughput: Can handle much more data per second than SATA.
- Parallelism: Supports up to 64,000 command queues, allowing for efficient multi-core processing.
Form Factor
Most NVMe drives use the M.2 form factor, though some high-end enterprise drives use U.2 or PCIe add-in cards.