many of life's biggest frustrations come in the form of bottlenecking whether
you're stuck in traffic trying to get to work before you get fired trying to cram
as many hot dogs as you can into your mouth for an ill-advised eating
competition or actually building one of those little ship-in-a-bottle things but
sometimes bottlenecks are a little bit less obvious as they often are with ssds
lots of common tasks on an SSD might seem nearly instantaneous especially for
users migrating from a mechanical hard drive but what if you're working with
larger files or hitting your drive with lots of requests at once although SATA
ssds will still give you much better performance in those situations than
your old spinning hard drive did they're actually seriously limited in a couple
of ways first SATA has an upper transfer limit about 600 megabytes per second
flash storage tech used in ssds has been capable of much faster speeds for quite
a while but because of the SATA speed limit even top-end SATA 3 drives won't
advertise or even give you speeds higher than 600 megabytes per second max
second SATA drives communicate with the rest of your computer using a standard
called the advanced host controller interface or ahci and even though that
might sound fancy in high performance hci wasn't really designed with ssds in
mind it was more of a way to make mechanical hard drives work a bit faster
and enable features like hot swapping these things are useful and great but
ahci was optimized for slow read write
heads that could only deal with so much data at a time not ssds that are capable
of accessing tons of their own data at once drive manufacturers responded by
rolling out ssds that use the much faster pci express bus which has a speed
limit of nearly 4 gigabytes per second with an x4 card and connects more
directly to the CPU than SATA reducing latency but in order to reach their
potential they needed a faster way of accessing data than ahci
enter non-volatile memory express or NVMe the new access standard for pci
express ssds NVMe takes advantage of the SSD's ability to read or write lots of
things at once by parallelizing instructions kind of like a multi-core
processor can split certain workloads over multiple cores in order to get
things done faster the biggest difference between NVMe and
ahci is something called command cueing which refers to how many requests for
data a drive can handle at one time hci
can handle one queue at a time with up to 32 pending commands a sensible number
for a hard drive with a slow moving head but very inefficient for a faster SSD
NVMe relieves this bottleneck by providing over 65 000 cues that can
handle over 65 000 commands each meaning
NVMe drives can stay super fast even if you're throwing a ton of stuff at them
you can find NVMe not only in ssds that plug into the pci express slot but also
m.2 and SATA express drives which use the pc express bus you can learn more
about those drives here before you run an upgrade though be sure your
computer's BIOS will support it as many biases from just a few years ago don't
actually fully recognize NVMe drives but if you're all set a shiny new NVMe drive
will make bottlenecking a thing of the past at least until the next time you're
waiting to be subjected to the wand of shame at the airport
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