Kingston highlights the many advantages of NVMe solid-state drives over SATA storage technology.
While CPU and GPU components tend to steal the limelight in terms of internal PC hardware, many consumers overlook the importance of high-performance storage. Storage determines everything from booting your operating system through to the speed of loading times for applications & games. A slow storage device will bottleneck other components in the system, making it one of the best ‘bang-per-buck’ performance upgrades available.
“Though often similar in physical appearance, there is a world of difference between SATA (Serial ATA) and NVMe (non-volatile memory express) solid state drives,” said Tony Hollingsbee SSD Business Manager, Kingston Technology. “NVMe was designed for SSDs and communicates directly with the CPU, while older SATA technology must go through additional controller hardware, adding latency and reducing performance.”
The art of communication
NVMe storage technology was designed for SSDs and is supported at the chipset and operating system level, communicating directly with the CPU through high-speed PCI Express lanes. SSDs such as Kingston’s KC2500 support read/writes speeds of up to 3,500/2,900 MB/s and capacities up to 2TB.
Upcoming PCIe Gen 4 solid state drives will take this a step further, by offering transfers rates of up to 32,000MB/s. Kingston is working towards offering a true PCIe Gen 4 product with all the performance gains that it will bring to users, as compatible platforms become more widely available
In contrast, SATA SSDs use the older ACHI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), which was designed for mechanical (spinning) hard disk drives and communicates through a separate chip on the motherboard or controller card. This technology only offers one command queue, which can hold 32 commands at the time that requires more CPU overhead, reduces performance and adds more latency.
The importance of IOPS
High megabyte per second figures often steal the headlines, but IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) are just as important to ensuring smooth performance, especially when multi-tasking. In this regard, NVMe allows users to take full advantage of the performance gains that SSDs offer, leading to dramatic improvements in the responsiveness of your PC or laptop, with real productivity and gaming benefits too.
To learn more about Kingston NVMe solid-state drives, visit www.kingston.com/en/solutions/servers-data-centers/should-i-make-the-switch-to-nvme
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