Term of the Moment
astroturfing
Definition: NVMe
(Non-Volatile Memory Express) A standard hardware interface for solid state drives (SSDs) that uses the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. Designed for desktop computers and introduced in 2011 by the NVM Express group, NVMe takes advantage of the parallel I/O in PCI Express and low latency of SSDs. It supports speeds up to six times faster than SATA SSDs and 10 times faster than hard drives, especially noticeable when reading and writing large files. See NVMe over Fabrics and NVMe HDD.
Three Form Factors: PCIe, M.2 and U.2
Traveling over PCI Express, NVMe SSDs come in three form factors: a PCI Express card, the small M.2 card and U.2, the latter supporting the traditional 2.5" and 3.5" drive sizes (see U.2). See PCI Express, M.2, SATA and SSD. For datacenter NVMe drives, see EDSFF.
Stack Up More Commands
One of the salient features in NVMe compared to SATA is the dramatic increase in the number of commands that can be queued (see NCQ).
NVMe on a "Gumstick" M.2 Card
NVMe M.2 on the Motherboard
The Largest NVMe Drive in 2025
SSD Acronyms
Three Form Factors: PCIe, M.2 and U.2
Traveling over PCI Express, NVMe SSDs come in three form factors: a PCI Express card, the small M.2 card and U.2, the latter supporting the traditional 2.5" and 3.5" drive sizes (see U.2). See PCI Express, M.2, SATA and SSD. For datacenter NVMe drives, see EDSFF.
Stack Up More Commands
One of the salient features in NVMe compared to SATA is the dramatic increase in the number of commands that can be queued (see NCQ).
Nearly a terabyte of SSD storage is contained on this 80x20mm M.2 card (pen is for size comparison). By 2020, NVMe SSDs reached eight terabytes (8TB). The "stick of gum" analogy is rather obvious. See M.2.
Modern desktop PC motherboards have dedicated M.2 slots as in this Asus example. This is looking down between the graphics card and heat sink.
Introduced in mid-2025, this 245TB drive from Kioxia is the largest NVMe drive on the market. At a physical size of 70x100x15 millimeters, four of these drives hold nearly one quadrillion bytes (see petabyte). (Image courtesy of Kioxia America Inc.)
NVMe is the controller protocol. PCIe is the pathway, and M.2 is the form factor. See PCI Express and M.2.