Today, the hype is all about NVMe, and a lot of discussions are going around the best protocol for storage devices. It is not that the traditional SATA is outdated, but NVMe offers amazing features and advantages compared to SATA and other older protocols.
Speed is the current trend, and users are ready to spend for drives that offer better data transfer rate and performance. Whether in businesses, gaming, or personal use, NVMe has become a common name due to the great developments with now-familiar technology.
What are NVMe and SATA SSDs?
Non-volatile Memory Express or NVMe is a communication interface that was developed to increase the performance and efficiency of solid-state drives. There is something called PCIe that supports NVMe to transfer data to SSDs and back. The motherboard contains PCIe sockets to help NVMe carry out successful communication between the computer’s central processing unit and the storage interface.
The kind of communication enabled by NVMe helps SSDs support the faster data transfer they are made for. Since NVMe permits several entries per input/output Submission Queue, the I/O operations performed with NVMe drivers use less energy and work faster than any conventional storage driver.
The incorporation of NVMe has led to higher performance by ensuring that critical data is accessed in no time. As a result, the scalability of the driver is assured by supporting all standard protocols and keeping in mind future requirements. The NVMe protocol is supported by all popular operating systems like Windows, Linux, and MacOS. This is an added advantage that enables the creation of high-performance hardware that can be used with any OS.
Let us now talk about SATA. Serial Advanced Technology Advancement or SATA can be thought of as a hard drive or a huge storage device that is rewritable. Even though it can be used for both hard and solid-state drives, it presently finds most of its uses in HDDs. With SATA, each drive has a separate bus, so they do not face bandwidth deficiency. It also makes way for great storage capacities and data transfer rates. The usage of thin, small cables lets more airflow inside the PC.
The latest version of SATA 3 has improved features and speed making it more reliable. This is why SATA 3 is used more than any other SATA interface today. But this does not mean that SATA has similar speeds as NVMe. As it was basically developed for hard drives, there is a limit regarding the transmission speed.
How NVMe can be better than SATA
NVMe is an interface for PCIe devices. When the read and write speeds of NVMe are considered, it is surprisingly five times faster than SATA and PCIe. Currently, SATA offers a data transfer speed of 600MBps, whereas this value can go up to 16GBps for NVMe. Some manufacturers offer up to 32GBps.
You must be aware of how the SSDs are way faster than traditional hard drives. But the problem is that SSDs cannot function most efficiently with SATA protocol. SATA does not let SSDs perform optimally. As SATA was the norm for storage for many years, the same technology was used to work with solid-state drives when they were introduced.
Realizing the issues that SATA can create for SSDs, it is slowly going out of the picture to be completely replaced by NVMes. Whether in the form of M.2 slots or PCIe slots, PCIe is definitely a sought out interface for SSDs that can be faster and efficient at the same time. Thus NVMe offers the best data transfer speeds at any time. It must be noted that the difference in speeds of NVMe and SATA is more noticeable when editing photos and videos and is less so in gaming.
NVMe and FPS
FPS means frames per second. There is no new information that a video is made up of many still images. When these images come one after the other in a particular order and speed, they trick us into believing that the images are moving.
Each image or picture is called a frame. The speed at which the images come sequentially is called the frame rate. The unit of frame rate in frames per second or FPS. To better understand, suppose that each second of a video shows 50 images that appear on the screen in a sequence. Now the speed here is 50FPS.
The quality of games depends greatly on FPS, which dictates what the PC has to do when a frame is being displayed from a game. Usually, games just have to read data from the storage device into memory. So the upgrade of SSDs does not affect the frame rate.
But solid-state drives that use NVMe can offer advantages while gaming too. NVMe SSDs, with their faster data transfer speed, enrich the gaming experience as the time required to boot the computer, load game levels etc. is significantly reduced.
Frame is found to influence the experience of viewing any video. The viewing experience you get from 24FPS will be different from that of 50FPS. Choosing the right one for your video depends on whether you want a realistic video or plan to go with techniques like slow motion.
You might have seen how certain movies look so life-like. These are shown in 24FPS as this frame rate is perfect for a cinematic look. But for events like sports where movement is more, it is better to go with frame rates higher than this to ensure smooth motion and attention to detail.
NVMe SSDs are popular for gaming and many other applications that work wonders with higher speed. Some unique features make NVMe special to meet the growing demands of the tech world. It is a protocol designed for high performance and will surely evolve to meet new data demands.