SATA or NVMe, which one is better?
Storage is an essential part of a computer, all the information is either stored on temporary memory or on permanent storage devices, we have already covered temporary memory on RAM, now let's look at how does permanent storage connects to your system.
Storage devices be it HDDs, or SSDs connect to your system through SATA or NVMe, so what's the difference between the two?
SATA VS PCIe NVMe
SATA
In the year 2000 SATA (Serial ATA) was made to replace the Parallel ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) standard that came before it. It is used as a communications bus for HDDs. The latest SATA 3.0 has a maximum throughput of 600 MB/s. It is way more than HDDs can use but SSDs run even faster than that so making SATA the bottleneck, you might not be able to use your SSD to its full potential. It is still the dominant interface for connecting an SSD to a PC. It uses the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) to acquire data. The main features brought by AHCI is NCQ (Native Command Queuing) (It also supports IDE), clearly intended to speed up mechanical hard drives and enable hot-swapping or switching hard drives without turning off the system. But AHCI is the first factor out of two that is limiting the improvement of SSDs. AHCI can only process on one queue at a time and store up to 32 pending commands. It is a sensible number for slow-moving heads in mechanical hard drives but it’s just a little dot of what NAND storage can process. The second factor that slows transfer speeds is latency caused by SATA’s indirect connection to the CPU.
PCIe NVMe
What is PCIe?
Though
computers might have a mix of various types of expansion slots, PCIe is now
known as the standard internal interface. The expansion of PCIe is unavoidable.
As entry-level PCIe 3.0 SSD speeds are two or three times faster than the latest
generation of SATA 3.0 SSDs mostly cause of the number of channels confined by
each to transfer data (Roughly 10 for SATA and 25 for PCIe).
What is NVMe?
The successor to AHCI
is NVMe (Non-volatile memory express protocol). It was established with just
the use of flash storage. Just like
SATA, NVMe was
intended to take advantage of the exceptional properties of pipeline-rich,
random access memory-based storage. It is a communication transfer protocol (or
language) developed specially for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Samsung,
SanDisk, Kingston, and Western Digital. All IT industry partners came together
to make a standard driver that all of them could adopt and support. It also imitates improvements in ways to lower
data latency since SATA was a thing. It is highly compatible. There is now only
one software interface standard for manufacturers to adhere to, so they don’t have
to write their own with their very good performance. No longer need to examine
vendors based on their compatibility with a particular operating system but now
they can look at the specific capabilities and cost of the card to determine
which is best for them, so a win-win situation. Uses for NVMe are AI,
high-performance computing, and
relational databases. These
types of drives come in two different form factors. M.2 and add-in cards. Add
in hard drives can use an x8 or x16 slot on the motherboard, usually found
below the processor. These plug into the motherboard in a similar way to
graphics cards. They have the speed as M.2 they use PCIe too just a slot made only
for them or wifi cards and known for their small form factor.
It’s best to use a
PCIe NVMe SSD, if you have the spare PCIe lanes. You should know how many PCIe
lanes your CPU provides and how many your graphics card and NVMe SSDs need. The PCIe NVMe bus can provide a five- or
ten-times performance increase over SATA based SSDs
While NVMe is
fantastic, you shouldn’t give up on SATA III drives just yet. Even though SATA
III’s limitations, it’s a pretty good choice for secondary storage. Anyone
who’s building a new PC, for example, would do well to use an M.2 NVMe drive
for their boot drive and primary storage. Then add a cheaper hard drive or
2.5-inch SSD with greater capacity as their secondary storage. And they are
half the price of NVMe for the same storage and still come in higher capacities
than PCIe NVMe drives.
Comments
Post a Comment