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Systems & Data Center · Foundational

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)

A storage protocol designed for flash that connects SSDs over PCIe with deep parallel queues and low latency.

Definition

NVMe supports up to 64K queues with up to 64K commands each, versus a single queue for AHCI/SATA. Devices appear as namespaces, such as /dev/nvme0n1 on Linux. Form factors include M.2, U.2, U.3 and E1/E3 EDSFF.

Example

nvme list shows each NVMe drive's namespaces, capacity and firmware on Linux.

Exam tip

NVMe's advantage is parallelism and low latency over PCIe, not just faster media.

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