PCIe vs NVMe: An Insight into Difference Between Commonly Used SSD Standards

SATA had long been the king of storage device connection standards, which was dominant in early hard drives and solid-state drives about a decade ago. However, with the introduction of newer standards such as mini PCIe and NVMe which offer much faster speeds, SATA is slowly in the process of being phased out as the standard connector point, at least for solid-state drives which are the norm today. In its place, NVMe and PCIe are being heralded as the worthy successors, and while we agree on that, it is difficult to arrive at a conclusion on which standard is the faster or more convenient one. Today, we’ll be looking at the properties of PCIe and NVMe and what makes them different.

PCIe Standard

PCIe stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express. It is a highly diverse slot that not only allows for the connection of mass storage devices but also for other internal devices of a computer. Almost every motherboard manufacturer has at least one PCIe slot on their motherboard models, which determines that PCIe has already become an industry standard for connecting internal peripherals of a computer.

PCIe can offer speeds much faster than the 600 MB/s of SATA connectors, and while they have been around since SATA days, only recently they are gaining traction because of their higher bandwidth of 1 GB/s for PCIe 3. 0. They consist of multiple data transmission lanes such as 4 lanes, 8 lanes or even 16 lanes. These lanes can easily scale up the bandwidth to greater levels.

NVMe Standard

Non-volatile memory express, also known as NVMe for short, is a newer communication standard that is developed exclusively for use in solid-state drives. Unlike PCIe which is used for a wide range of peripherals, NVMe is limited only to SSD connections and is designed to offer high-speed data transmission rates, often eclipsing PCIe in terms of speed.

NVMe was developed by a consortium of major IT companies who decided to create a standardized driver for solid-state drives, especially the newer ones so that they can be some of the fastest media of storage available. NVMe was specifically developed for flash-based storage, so legacy storage devices such as mechanical hard drives or disk drives are not compatible with NVMe. NVMe is generally used in professional environments and applications such as workstations and server equipment.

NVMe vs PCIe

A big advantage of PCIe is that it can be compatible with legacy hardware such as mechanical hard disks, either directly or via adapters and converters. Hence, they are great for using in all types of peripheral connections. NVMe works only with memory-based drives such as SSD, so they are only to be used with the newest computers and workstations. That is why many companies that house server equipment use NVMe for servers because they can be tweaked to handle heavy bandwidth, and PCIe for individual usage where a lot of data is not usually transmitted or used. Many manufacturers even combine PCIe and NVMe together to get the best of both worlds.