we're used to getting revisions of computer standards fairly regularly
think about how many versions of usb ddr and pci express we've been through but
we haven't had to put much thought into NVMe so far as there's only been one
major version of it until now as the NVMe 2.0 standard has just been released
in case you're out of loop NVMe or non-volatile memory express is the
protocol that pci express connected storage drives use because it's much
faster than the older SATA standard it's enabled those gaudy four figure
throughput numbers you see on manufacturer spec sheets for m.2 drives
and the NVMe 2.0 specification is bringing some new features to the table
so let's dive right in one of the major improvements is for something called
zoned namespaces and that might sound like some kind of forward thinking
therapy collective but it's actually a system designed to address some of the
biggest issues with ssds you see even though ssds are a lot faster than
old-school spinning hard drives there's a significant amount of inefficiency
under the hood because the cells in an SSD can only be written to so many times
before they wear out for good the SSD's internal logic has to move data around
in a process called wear leveling to make sure certain cells don't exhaust
their lifespans more quickly than others additionally ssds can't directly
overwrite cells instead cells have to have their data erased first
and this has to be done in groups of cells so any data in that group that the
system needs to preserve must be copied to an empty area ssds reserve a certain
amount of space called over provisioning to support these data operations meaning
a significant amount of storage is inaccessible to the user NVMe 2.0 zoned
namespaces help alleviate this situation by allowing programs to reserve specific
physical areas on the SSD and write data
for that program sequentially without zone name spaces the SSD itself would be
in charge of what data goes where and this often results in a specific
program's data being scattered all over the drive meaning that any changes to
that data could require lots of those read copy delete actions that use a
large amount of over provisioned space but with zoned namespaces a smaller
physical footprint per program means the SSD won't have to over provision as much
space nor do so many reads and writes
meaning effectively larger drives with better endurance for the same cost and
programs could also see a performance boost from zone name spaces as ssds read
and write sequential data faster than they do random data so not only is this
good for consumers like you and me but larger organizations should see an even
greater benefit than us since when you're running lots of ssds in parallel
such as inside a gigantic server farm having that much wasted space and
latency can have a significant negative impact not to mention the direct cost of
having to replace drives that wear out the second significant benefit of NVMe
2.0 that we're going to discuss today is it's surprising support for mechanical
hard drives but why would it support mechanical hard
drives i mean even higher end drives can't come anywhere close to using the
full bandwidth of plain old SATA so
what gives it turns out that recent advances in hard drive manufacturing
have allowed drives to read data off the platters more quickly partly due to
improvements in the actuators that move the drive parts around and partly due to
fitting more data on the platters themselves through techniques like heat
assisted magnetic recording which you can learn about up here
hammer time this means that some hard drives that are just starting to hit the
market can get sustained transfer rates above 500 megabytes per second
sequentially which is comparable to SATA based ssds
NVMe 2.0 will provide enough bandwidth to ensure newer hard drives can max out
their potential especially important in larger settings that use lots of hard
drives for mass storage they can share data among themselves quickly of course
because the NVMe 2.0 spec was released recently it'll be a while before we see
products that support it but hopefully the result will be larger cheaper drives
for your home pc and quicker more reliable access to cloud services i just
wouldn't expect disney to slash the price of your streaming subscription
with the money they're saving on drives world doesn't tend to work like that
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