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What is NVMe®?
NVM Express® (NVMe® is a specification defining how host software communicates with non-volatile memory across a PCI Express® (PCIe®) bus. It is the industry standard for PCIe solid state drives (SSDs) in all form factors (U.2, M.2, AIC, EDSFF). NVM Express is the non-profit consortium of tech industry leaders defining, managing and marketing NVMe technology. In addition to the NVMe base specification, the organization hosts other specifications: NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) for using NVMe commands over a networked fabric and NVMe Management Interface (NVMe-MI™) to manage NVMe/PCIe SSDs in servers and storage systems.
The NVMe specification was designed from the ground up for SSDs. It is a much more efficient interface, providing lower latency, and is more scalable for SSDs than legacy interfaces, like serial ATA (SATA). The first part of the specification is the host control interface. The NVMe architecture brings a new high performance queuing mechanism that supports 65,535 I/O queues each with 65,535 commands (referred to as queue depth, or number of outstanding commands). Queues are mapped to CPU cores delivering scalable performance. The NVMe interface significantly reduces the number of memory-mapped input/output commands and accommodates operating system device drivers running in interrupt or polling modes for higher performance and lower latency. The NVMe specification also contains host-to-device protocol for SSD commands used by an operating system for: read, write, flush, TRIM, firmware management, temperature, errors and others.
NVM Express News
NVM Express Honored with Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology for Best of Show Award at Flash Memory Summit 2020
NVM Express Honored with Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology for Best of Show Award at Flash Memory Summit 2020 New NVMe® [...]
Newly Released Versions of DMTF Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ Specifications Include NVMe™ and NVMe-oF™ Specification Enhancements
Details Presented During SNIA Storage Developer Conference 2020 COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. and BEAVERTON, Ore. and PORTLAND, Ore., Sept. 21, 2020 - The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), NVM Express and DMTF announced today the newly [...]
NVM Express, Inc. Honored with Flash Memory Technology Award at FMS 2019
The Upcoming NVMe-oF™ 1.1 Specification Provides Superior Congestion Management, Pioneering Transport Capabilities and Improved Automation Tactics with the Use of New [...]
NVMe® Technology for Boot and Beyond
By James Gomez, Deepak Kurien and Rohit Gupta, Western Digital In this blog we will look at how NVM Express® (NVMe®) [...]
NVMe® RAID: Making Storage Faster Than Ever
By James Guilmart, Intel As storage medias, protocols, architectures and form factors have evolved over the past several decades, one component [...]
NVM Express: An Interesting Look Back at 2020
Although 2020 brought challenges beyond our imagination, the NVM Express community stayed hard at work to make flash storage faster and [...]