Reinventing SSDs with NVMe

There are several transport protocols that are used to access mechanical and SSDs. Protocols such as SATA, SCSI, and SAS were originally designed for mechanical drives. Hence, these are more geared toward leveraging the potential of rotating drives. With the inception of SSDs, these protocols began to be used for these types of drives as well. Most SSDs, especially in the earlier days, used SATA and SAS ports, just like any other mechanical drive. They would easily fit into existing mechanical drive slots and get connected to the system through a SATA or SAS controller. Despite the major performance gains when using SSDs, the fact that the interfaces, protocols, and command sets that were originally written for mechanical drives were being used for SSDs was considered an overhead, and it was widely thought that this somewhat restricted flash drives from unleashing their full potential.

The NVMe interface was designed specifically for technologies such...