I tried reading the description on Tom’s Hardware website, but I didn’t understand what I was reading.
In: Technology
NVMe is a faster equivalent to SATA for connecting the drive to the system
SATA was built for old HDDs which are relatively slow and can’t respond to very many requests in a timely manner. NVMe was designed explicitly for SSDs, specifically those little ones that go in that narrow M.2 slot on the motherboard.
NVMe using 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes will manage about 32 Gb/s while SATA 3 will manage just 6 Gb/s giving NVMe a peak throughput that’s 5x higher, but real performance can be even higher.
Old hard drives are ludicrously slow compared to the CPU taking millions of clock cycles so requests were punted out and checked on a couple eons later, but modern SSDs are only a couple orders of magnitude slower than RAM(tens of thousands of clock cycles) and it can read multiple blocks at the same time so NVMe increased the amount of different requested datablocks that can be queued up for the SSD since it can get to them in a timely manner, this means that more of the SSD is busy at any given moment so you lose less time waiting between reads. Having a 32 Gb/s bandwidth doesn’t help if you spend 75% of your time waiting for the next thing to read so the deeper queue helps significantly.
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