Gadgetory

many of life's biggest frustrations come in the form of bottlenecking whether you're stuck in traffic trying to get to work before you get fired trying to cram as many hot dogs as you can into your mouth for an ill-advised eating competition or actually building one of those little ship-in-a-bottle things but sometimes bottlenecks are a little bit less obvious as they often are with SSDs lots of common tasks on an SSD might seem nearly instantaneous especially for users migrating from a mechanical hard drive but what if you're working with larger files are hitting your drive with lots of requests at once although SATA SSDs will still give you much better performance in those situations than your old spinning hard drive did they're actually seriously limited in a couple of ways first SATA has an upper transfer limit about 600 megabytes per second flash storage tech used in SSDs has been capable of much faster speeds for quite a while but because of the SATA speed limit even top-end SATA 3 drives won't advertise or even give you speeds higher than 600 megabytes per second max second SATA drives communicate with the rest of your computer using a standard called the advanced host controller interface or a HCI and even though that might sound fancy and high-performance HCI wasn't really designed with SSDs in mind it was more of a way to make mechanical hard drives work a bit faster and enable features like hot swapping these things are useful and great but HCI was optimized for slow read/write heads that can only deal with so much data at a time not SSDs that are capable of accessing tons of their own data at once drive manufacturers responded by rolling out SSDs that use the much faster PCI Express bus which has a speed limit of nearly 4 gigabytes per second with an x4 card and connects more directly to the CPU than SATA reducing latency but in order to reach their potential they needed a faster way of accessing data than a HCI enter non-volatile memory Express or nvme the new access standard for PCI Express SSDs nvme takes advantage of the SSDs ability to read or write lots of things at once by parallelizing instructions kind of like a multi-core processor can split certain workloads over multiple cores in order to get things done faster the biggest difference between nvme and ahci something called command queuing which refers to how many requests for data a drive can handle at one time HCI can handle one cue at a time with up to 32 pending commands a sensible number for a hard drive with a slow moving head but very inefficient for a faster SSD nvme relieves this bottleneck by providing over 65,000 queues that can handle over 65,000 commands each meaning nvme drives can stay super fast even if you're throwing a ton of stuff at them you can find nvme not only in SSDs that plug into the PCI Express slot but also m2 and SATA Express drives which use the PCI Express bus you can learn more about those drives here before you run an upgrade though be sure your computer's BIOS will support it as many biases from just a few years ago don't actually fully recognize nvme drives but if you're all set a shiny new nvme drive will make bottlenecking a thing of the past at least until the next time you're waiting to be subjected to the wand of shame at the airport lynda.com with a lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about what they're teaching and you can stream thousands of video courses on demand and learn on your own schedule as fast as you would like on your own pace all that kind of stuff I'm currently doing that I'm currently trying to learn filming and editing stuff and the teacher that I have for it through lynda.com is awesome and super passionate about it and it's absolutely helpful having a passionate teacher you can take notes as you go and refer to them later on you can download toriel's and watch them on the go including access on your iOS or Android devices you can create and save playlists of courses that you want to watch or customize your learning path or share with your friends or colleagues and team members or whatever your lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics all at a flat rate starting at just $25 a month whether you're looking to become an industry expert you're passionate about a hobby or you just want to learn something new I want you to visit linda.com slash tech wiki and sign up for your free 10 day trial today if you liked the video like it sorry we so late on an nvme video I actually thought we had one if you just liked it dislike it we have a pretty cool video coming on channel super fun very soon where we prank the crap out of Yvonne who is now working in office call me down below with video suggestions or things you'd like us to cover things we might have missed like nvme and don't forget to subscribe and follow