SSD and NVMe - what sets the two storage media apart?

The permanent storage of digital information poses a technical challenge because the storage medium must maintain its state stable over a long period without power supply. Early media such as HDD or Floppy Disk used magnetic sectors for this purpose, while CD-Rom or BluRay relied on optical features. However, both systems have significant drawbacks, leading them to be increasingly replaced by purely electronic methods like SSD and, shortly after, NVMe since 2010. Although both variants use similar methods for storing information, they differ significantly in aspects such as speed and performance.

How do digital storage media like NVMe and SSD work?

Due to their fundamental operation, all computers use binary processing of information - specifically, this means that they can only differentiate between the two states of On or Off. This technological process stems from historical development - originally, the first mainframe computers consisted of a multitude of transistors connected in parallel, which could be either charged or discharged, thus forming a simple memory. This principle remains unchanged even in modern hardware such as processors, memory, and SSD or NVMe drives - however, the transistors used now have a size of just a few nanometers. This miniaturisation offers the advantage of significantly increasing information density for an identical size, but it also requires considerable effort to create structures precisely and avoid production errors. Nowadays, storage media can be found in NVMe SSD VPS hosting or NVMe SSD Dedicated Servers, as well as in NVMe SSD web hosting.

What are SSDs and how do electronic data storage work?

What are NVMe and what special features distinguish them?

Technologically, NVMe is a type of SSD. However, the key difference between "traditional" SSDs and the increasingly popular NVMe lies in the way the computer system communicates with the data storage.

Specifically, NVM Express is a software protocol released in 2011 that allows data storage to communicate over the PCI Express standard instead of the traditional AHCI interface for SATA drives connected to storage expansion cards. The speed of this interface in its latest version is 64 gigatransfers per second, equating to a theoretical bandwidth of around 512 gigabytes per second. In contrast, traditional SSD storage uses the SATA standard designed for drives, with its latest version allowing a maximum speed of approximately 650 megabytes per second. While these are theoretical maximum values, in practice NVMe achieves significantly better performance with speeds multiple times faster than a SATA SSD. For this reason, NVMe is considered the top choice for systems and servers requiring high computing power or extremely fast data access. Typical examples of such requirements include dedicated servers for external database management, Cloud Servers with a hardware infrastructure distributed across multiple servers, or mission-critical IT infrastructures requiring maximum availability with minimal latencies and Server Response Time.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of SSD and NVMe?

It is expected that NVMe is likely to prevail over SSD in the medium to long term as manufacturers expand production capacities, component prices decrease, and more efficient production processes are established. However, based on historical developments in price structures and the adoption of drives, it can be predicted that SSDs will continue to play a significant role as storage media until at least 2030.

Some of the advantages include:

• Widespread availability of SATA ports and specialised motherboards with numerous connections
• Compatibility with other technologies like HDD drives
• Universal interface with almost unrestricted compatibility
• Lower costs compared to NVMe for similar storage capacities
• Performance and speed mostly dependent on system and peripheral hardware
• Easy and convenient installation
• Almost unrestricted compatibility between models, form factors, and manufacturers
• Good performance with excellent cost-effectiveness
• Low costs with a wide range of models and storage capacities

On the other hand, in some projects there are also compelling arguments for using NVMe, as they offer significant advantages in certain situations:

• Extremely high performance with significantly faster bandwidth
• Very fast access to numerous small files
• Short response times under high system load
• High reliability and data integrity
• Enhancement of overall performance through minimal transfer times
• Minimal latency due to support for numerous parallel data accesses

In practical use, NVMe shows only benefits with a Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server, but typically incur higher costs for an identical storage capacity. Their strengths lie in significantly improved performance and speed - however, not every server benefits from these features. An essential requirement for a positive impact is that the virtual or dedicated server performs tasks that require frequent, parallel, and rapidly changing data queries - typical examples include heavily loaded web servers or external database servers with complex tables. In contrast, no benefits are seen with static connections, such as a file server accessed via FTP, as the speed is primarily limited by the network connection's bandwidth.

Image credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay