NVMe overview-2

NVMe Protocol Advantages

NVMe as a storage protocol is designed from the ground up to work with non-volatile memory (NVM), including the current NAND flash technology and next-generation NVM technologies. As such, it does not have the same limitations as storage protocols designed for hard disk drives.

NVMe protocol supports multiple deep queues, which is an advancement over traditional SAS and SATA protocols. Typical SAS devices support up to 256 commands and SATA devices support up to 32 commands in a single queue. These were adequate for hard disk drive technologies, but cannot take full advantage of current and next-generation NVM technologies.

In contrast, NVMe supports 64K commands per queue and up to 64K queues. These queues are designed such that I/O commands and responses to those commands operate on the same processor core and can take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of multi-core processors. Each application or thread can have i