NVMe drives — a brief history
NVMe drives are not such a new solution anymore, and they are now used in dedicated servers as well. The SSD drives we are used to connect via the SATA-3 interface, where the maximum speed is limited to 600 MB/s, and the logic is handled by the outdated AHCI.
This mechanism was originally designed a long time ago for magnetic HDD drives and does not work particularly well with solid-state storage.
Given that SSD drives can reach speeds of up to 3 GB/s, Intel decided to replace AHCI with a dedicated logic called NVMe and move the drives onto the PCI Express interface.
In other words, NVMe drives are the same SSD drives, but connected to the motherboard via the fast PCI Express interface and running on the new logic of the same name.
Advantages of NVMe over SSD
Without a doubt, all of the changes mentioned above gave drives a second wind, namely:
- Command queue depth: up to 65K queues and up to 65K commands per queue. Previously: 1 queue and 32 commands per queue.
- Interrupt handling and MSI-X: 2K interrupts delivered via MSI-X or messages. Previously: 1 interrupt and no interrupt management at all.
- Speed: NVMe SSD delivers a maximum speed of up to 3.2 GB/s, which is 5-6 times faster than an SSD on SATA-3.
On dedicated servers, NVMe SSD drives are connected using the U.2 form factor.
Its advantages are a smaller size and hot-swap capability (a drive can be replaced without powering off the server).
With us, the hosting provider master-server.pro, you can rent virtual or dedicated servers with NVMe drives of various capacities (from 240GB to 8TB) at minimal prices.
To clarify available configurations, please contact our support team.