![]() PCIe is also the foundation for the Thunderbolt interface, which is starting to pay dividends with external graphics cards for gaming, as well as external NVMe storage, which is nearly as fast as internal NVMe. As of generation 3.x, it offers multiple lanes (up to 16 for use with any one device in most PCs) that handle darn near 1GBps each (985MBps). PCIe is the underlying data transport layer for graphics and other add-in cards. Even version 3.3 is far slower slower than what today’s SSD technology is capable of, especially in RAID configurations.Īs a replacement for the SATA bus, it was decided to leverage a much higher-bandwidth bus technology that was also already in place-PCI Express, or PCIe. Though the SATA bus has evolved to 16Gbps as of version 3.3, nearly all commercial implementations remain 6Gbps (roughly 550MBps after communications overhead). But, as the first SSDs were relatively slow (and bulky), it proved far more convenient to use the existing SATA storage infrastructure. Knowing well the ultimate performance potential of NAND-based SSDs even when they first showed up, it was clear to the industry that a new bus and protocol would eventually be needed. But for your operating system, programs, and oft-used data, you want an NVMe SSD if your system supports it, or a SATA SSD if it can’t. Hard drives still offer tremendous bang for the buck in terms of capacity and are wonderful for less-used data. The approximate performance ceilings for the three mainstream storage technologies as things now stand are: That’s on top of the four- to five-fold improvement in throughput and ten-fold improvement in seek times that was already provided by SATA SSDs when compared to hard drives. ![]() ![]() Not only that, but it locates them 10 times as fast (seek). 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. Programs pop open, files load and save in an instant, and the machine boots and shuts down in just a few seconds. 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. Storage was the last bottleneck for real and perceived performance, but it’s now wide-pour with a vengeance. 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, first SATA, and now NVMe. Like never-have-to-wait-again-for-your-computer fast. 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. NVMe is a communications standard developed specially for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Dell, and Seagate. Moreover, if your PC is of fairly recent vintage, you should upgrade to NVMe. If you’re shopping for a new PC, it’s a feature you should actively seek out. ![]() NVMe is no longer a nice-to-have storage technology. All M.2 NVMe SSDs are a standard 22mm, however, other products may vary in. On software side, it is important to know, the drivers are a function of the host.
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