NVMe is a new logical-device interface standard designed for SSDs and PCI Express. (The measure of how many commands a drive has in the hopper is known as its 'queue depth' for more SSD jargon explained, check out Buying a Solid-State Drive: 20 Terms You Need to Know.) Clearly, a new internal, system-level interface is needed that's built for modern computing and for the strengths of current and future solid-state storage.Д®nter Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe for short.

But SSDs, partially because they have no moving parts, have low latency, and they can accommodate many more read/write commands at once. It was built to accommodate hard drives, which have high latency, due to their rotating media and physical read/write heads. (For a primer on M.2 drives and the background issues, check out our roundup Buying the Best M.2 Solid-State Drive.)ДЄHCI has been around since 2004, but age isn't its biggest problem. PCI Express has much more bandwidth than SATA, but even it has limits, given its current AHCI-reliant implementation for consumer SSDs. That even applies to drives such as the Plextor M6e M.2 (G256M6e) we tested last year, which connects via the emerging M.2 physical interface to the PCI Express bus.

Up until now, consumer SSDs have all relied on the venerable Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) to communicate between the drive and the rest of the system.

Intel s-s-d 750 series pcie aic 1.2tb