I tried reading the description on Tom’s Hardware website, but I didn’t understand what I was reading.
In: Technology
It’s a specification (list of agreed ways that two pieces of stuff can interact) for how computers can talk to storage devices that use non-volatile memory and are connected over a particular connection type called PCI Express.
Think of a normal USB flash drive…that’s NVM connecting over a Universal Serial Bus (USB). The USB specification tells computers and flash driver manufacturers how the devices should behave, that’s why you can plug any flash drive into an USB port and, generally, it will work.
Except USB isn’t fast enough, in a lot of cases, for main computer storage like the hard drive, and it doesn’t take advantage of some of the unique properties of solid state drives (USB has to work for lots of things). PCI Express is a much faster connection that can be used to talk to high throughput devices like graphics cards or solid state drives, and it supports moving a lot of data in parallel, which solid state drives are good at (but hard drives aren’t). NVMe is the name of the specification that covers SSDs over PCI Express, so any SSD (in theory) will connect properly to any PCI Express bus.
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