▷ Why buy a ssd nvme

NVMe is no longer a storage technology within the reach of very few pockets. Over the last few months, we have seen the arrival of models with very competitive prices, and excellent performance. In this articles we explain the most important reasons why another for an NVMe SSD for your PC.

What is NVMe and why is it so interesting?

NVMe is a communications protocol developed especially for SS D, by a consortium of providers that includes Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Dell, and Seagate. It works through the PCIe bus, which allows the drives to work very quickly, overcoming the limitations of the SATA interface. Simply put, NVMe is fast very fast.

We recommend reading our post on the best SSDs of the moment SATA, M.2 NVMe and PCIe

An NVMe drive can be added to any PC with a PCIe slot via an adapter card. All the recent versions of the main operating systems provide drivers, and regardless of the age of the system, you will have something very fast on your hands. However, there is a catch. To fully benefit from an NVMe SSD, you must be able to boot the operating system from it, which requires BIOS support. Most older BIOSes do not support booting from NVMe and probably never will.

An NVMe SSD like the relatively inexpensive and very fast Samsung 970 EVO can be installed in an M.2 slot, or in a normal PCIe slot by means of a cheap adapter card. Most consumer NVMe SSDs use the M.2 form factor. But simply having an M.2 slot does not guarantee NVMe compatibility. M.2 was designed to support USB 3.0, SATA and PCIe. Most of the early M.2 slots only supported SATA. Read your motherboard's user guide, or check online to make sure your motherboard's M.2 slot supports NVMe.

There is no way to tell if it supports both PCIe and NVMe when looking at a slot, but you can see the difference between a PCIe x2 slot and a PCIe x4 slot. The first, called B-keyed, has six contacts separated from the rest, while the last one has five contacts separated from the rest on the opposite side. There is no hard and fast rule, but many B-key slots were just SATA.

What you should avoid as an end user are 2.5-inch NVMe drives. These require the SFF-8639 connector. An SFF-8639 connection features four Gen 3 PCIe lines, two SATA ports, plus sideband channels and both 3.3 volts and 12 volts of power, but found only in enterprise-grade storage systems and adapters.

Working with an NVMe SSD will not drain your patience

While almost any NVMe should make your system feel faster, not all of them are created equal. Not even close. While the Samsung 970 EVO will read at over 3GBps and write at over 2.5GBps, the Toshiba RC100 reads at 1.2GBps and writes at just under 900MBps. The difference can be even greater when the amount of written data exceeds the amount of on-board cache. This speed is much higher than that achieved by a SATA SSD, which ceiling at approximately 560 MB / s. The speed difference will make your programs open faster, the file copies will go at the speed of light (well, almost), and you will not despair waiting for the tasks to be completed, as long as they depend on the speed of the storage.

There are several factors that affect performance, including the controller, the number of NANDs on board, the number of PCIe lanes, and the type of NAND. Here are some general rules:

• NVMe PCIe x4 SSDs are faster than PCIe x2 SSDs The more NAND chips, the more routes and destinations the controller has to distribute and store data on. Smaller capacity units are typically slower than higher capacity units. The type of NAND used matters. SLC is faster, MLC is next, TLC is slower, and QLC is even slower. However, the formula is complicated by the fact that you can treat any type of NAND like its faster predecessor by simply writing fewer bits. Providers do this with portions of the SSD to use as a cache, meaning that a TLC or QLC drive can be as fast as an SLC drive, until this cache is exhausted. Most current drivers are very efficient, but some, such as those used by Intel and Sandisk, are smarter about how they use cache and can maintain write performance with larger data sets.

Its high speed will make NVMe the storage technology you want for your current or next PC. Unless you're a gamer or a high-resolution video editor, it practically guarantees that you won't feel the need to replace your current system for a while, at least for performance.

Here ends our post on why buy an NVMe SSD, remember that you can share it on social networks so that it can help more users who need it. You can also leave a comment if you have any suggestions to add.