NVMe As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
926 words · ~4 min read
0:00
many of life's biggest frustrations come in the form of bottlenecking whether
0:04
you're stuck in traffic trying to get to work before you get fired trying to cram
0:07
as many hot dogs as you can into your mouth for an ill-advised eating
0:11
competition or actually building one of those little ship-in-a-bottle things but
0:15
sometimes bottlenecks are a little bit less obvious as they often are with ssds
0:19
lots of common tasks on an SSD might seem nearly instantaneous especially for
0:24
users migrating from a mechanical hard drive but what if you're working with
0:27
larger files or hitting your drive with lots of requests at once although SATA
0:32
ssds will still give you much better performance in those situations than
0:35
your old spinning hard drive did they're actually seriously limited in a couple
0:40
of ways first SATA has an upper transfer limit about 600 megabytes per second
0:45
flash storage tech used in ssds has been capable of much faster speeds for quite
0:50
a while but because of the SATA speed limit even top-end SATA 3 drives won't
0:56
advertise or even give you speeds higher than 600 megabytes per second max
1:01
second SATA drives communicate with the rest of your computer using a standard
1:05
called the advanced host controller interface or ahci and even though that
1:10
might sound fancy in high performance hci wasn't really designed with ssds in
1:15
mind it was more of a way to make mechanical hard drives work a bit faster
1:19
and enable features like hot swapping these things are useful and great but
1:24
ahci was optimized for slow read write
1:27
heads that could only deal with so much data at a time not ssds that are capable
1:32
of accessing tons of their own data at once drive manufacturers responded by
1:36
rolling out ssds that use the much faster pci express bus which has a speed
1:41
limit of nearly 4 gigabytes per second with an x4 card and connects more
1:46
directly to the CPU than SATA reducing latency but in order to reach their
1:51
potential they needed a faster way of accessing data than ahci
1:56
enter non-volatile memory express or NVMe the new access standard for pci
2:01
express ssds NVMe takes advantage of the SSD's ability to read or write lots of
2:06
things at once by parallelizing instructions kind of like a multi-core
2:10
processor can split certain workloads over multiple cores in order to get
2:15
things done faster the biggest difference between NVMe and
2:18
ahci is something called command cueing which refers to how many requests for
2:22
data a drive can handle at one time hci
2:26
can handle one queue at a time with up to 32 pending commands a sensible number
2:32
for a hard drive with a slow moving head but very inefficient for a faster SSD
2:36
NVMe relieves this bottleneck by providing over 65 000 cues that can
2:42
handle over 65 000 commands each meaning
2:46
NVMe drives can stay super fast even if you're throwing a ton of stuff at them
2:51
you can find NVMe not only in ssds that plug into the pci express slot but also
2:55
m.2 and SATA express drives which use the pc express bus you can learn more
3:00
about those drives here before you run an upgrade though be sure your
3:04
computer's BIOS will support it as many biases from just a few years ago don't
3:08
actually fully recognize NVMe drives but if you're all set a shiny new NVMe drive
3:13
will make bottlenecking a thing of the past at least until the next time you're
3:17
waiting to be subjected to the wand of shame at the airport
3:21
lynda.com with a lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts
3:26
who are passionate about what they're teaching and you can stream thousands of
3:29
video courses on demand and learn on your own schedule as fast as you would
3:33
like on your own pace all that kind of stuff i'm currently doing that i'm
3:37
currently trying to learn filming and editing stuff and the teacher that i
3:40
have for it through lynda.com is awesome and super passionate about it and it's
3:44
actually helpful having a passionate teacher you can take notes as you go and
3:48
refer to them later on you can download tutorials and watch them on the go
3:51
including access on your iOS or Android devices you can create and save
3:55
playlists of courses that you want to watch or customize your learning path or
3:59
share with your friends or colleagues and team members or whatever
4:03
your lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds
4:07
of topics all at a flat rate starting at just 25 a month whether you're looking
4:11
to become an industry expert you're passionate about a hobby or you just
4:16
want to learn something new i want you to visit lynda.com techwiki and sign up
4:21
for your free 10-day trial today
4:25
if you liked the video like it sorry we were so late on an NVMe video i actually
4:29
thought we had one if you disliked it dislike it we have a pretty cool video
4:33
coming on Channel Super Fun very soon where we prank the crap out of Yvonne
4:38
who is now working in office comment down below with video
4:42
suggestions or things you'd like us to cover or things we might have missed
4:46
like NVMe and don't forget to subscribe and follow