I tried reading the description on Tom’s Hardware website, but I didn’t understand what I was reading.
In: Technology
Ok, so you know how old spinning platter drives the OS would ask the drive – hey, give me data starting at this block and offset. The read/write heads would move into position over the block (a physical location on one of the platters) and start to read bytes.
Soooooper slow. Limited by how fast the disk spun. So to speed that up disks started having cache memory. Some smart look-ahead and usage caching would pre-read the entire file into cache memory so when the OS asked for the file, it was in quick cache memory.
BUT, SSD drives were meant to be replacements for spinning platter drives, so access to them through OS drivers > motherboard > disk controllers > on-drive controller still had to use the same old familiar protocols and signalling… which were designed for the old slower technology.
Now that flash memory access is soooo much faster if you could ditch all that legacy crap and let the OS+filesystem talk directly to specific memory addresses on the SSD’s memory chips, you could read/write very very fast.
So that’s basically what NVMe is – it allows near direct communication between your OS and filesystem and the memory controllers on the SSD. But it requires special hardware support from your computer’s mobo/chipset and corresponding OS drivers.
May not be the best analogy, but first in my head: Back in the day cargo ships had to be loaded/unloaded manually – lifting bags and boxes of cargo one by one or in slings in and out of cargo hatches. Cranes and loading tech got better, so did packaging of cargo, but they were still limited by the cargo hatches and ship structures. Along came metal cargo containers, now whole cargoes are put in/taken off ships literally by robots. So much faster.
It would be like instead of loading passengers into an airplane seat by seat or row by row, the plane just picked up the whole gate/lounge area and flew off with it.
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