PCIE and NVMe explained

Storage technology has progressed significantly over the last five years and SSD technology is at the forefront of these advancements. The latest smartphones, tablets and computers are now demanding more, higher-capacity flash storage to satisfy demand and datacentres are retaining more information as many turn to cloud backup services. The explosion of SSD technology over recent years has forced manufacturers to ‘up their game’ and offer something different other than price point. Read/write speeds are all fairly similar especially when a SATA interface is used. But what if you need something quicker? The demand for performance is also undoubtedly increasing as datacentres fuel the need for data to be accessed and processed at much quicker rates. So how do you get quicker speeds than 500Mb/s? The answer lies in the interface. SATA 3 has long been the bastion of SSD interface technology and will be for some time yet. However, more manufacturers are turning their attention to the next generation of interface tech, namely PCIe. What is PCIe? Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, often seen abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-E, is a standard type of connection for internal devices in a computer. PCIe has been around for a number of years but is seeing increasing adoption owing to its speed. Because of SATA 3.0 600Gbps ceiling, PCIe is starting to supersede SATA as the latest high-bandwidth interface. A PCIe connection consists of one or more data-transmission lanes connected serially. Each lane consists of two pairs of wires, one for receiving and one for transmitting. You can have one, four, eight or sixteen lanes in a single PCIe slot, denoted as x1, x4, x8, or x16. PCIe technology enables interface speeds of up to 1GB/s per client lane (PCIe 3.0), versus today’s SATA technology speeds of up to 0.6GB/s (SATA 3.0). More lanes from SATA require more SATA devices, but PCIe bandwidth can be scaled up to 16 lanes on a single device. While computers may contain a mix of various types of expansion slots, PCIe is considered the standard internal interface. Many computer motherboards today are manufactured only with PCIe slots, so progression to PCIe is inevitable.

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