The SATA standard did not offer disadvantages for hard drives, since their maximum speed was (and is) very far from what commercial hard drives can achieve. However, with SSDs it was obvious early on that the SATA standard fell short, and it’s starting to show up on hard drives too. Luckily, in 2011 the NVM Express , or NVMe standard was created, allowing you to take advantage of all the benefits of PCI Express for storage. Now comes the new version that replaces the current 1.4 standard announced in 2019.
This has been announced by the company NVM Express, Inc , where the new restructured NVMe 2.0 specification allows faster and easier integrations in all types of devices, now also including hard drives .
NVMe now supports hard drives
NVMe is the leading technology in SSDs today, where it is also expected to continue growing at an average annual rate of 43% until 2024. As speed increases, it will be necessary to have the necessary tools to deal with it.
Therefore, the specifications have been adapted for this unprecedented growth, with a standard that will be the same for companies, individuals and cloud hosting services. Thus, with NVMe 2.0, the standard can be used in SSD drives, removable cards, accelerators and hard drives .
Among the new key specifications we have a multitude of changes, such as a new ZNS specification that allows data to be physically stored on the SSD in a more efficient way, improving performance. Table translation overhead between keys and logic blocks is also reduced, allowing direct communication thanks to the KV Command Set.
The control of storage units is also improved, as well as the standard is made compatible with hard drives, adapting the standard to the functionalities they require. The rest of the tools are aimed at remote management of this type of storage unit, such as improvements when controlling shutdown, or greater protection against malicious changes. All of this will also help improve the life of the SSDs.
It is backwards compatible, and necessary for hard drives
The new NVMe 2.0 standard will be backward compatible with the current 1.4 and previous ones, so that a unit compatible with NVMe 2.0 can be used in a device compatible only with the first version, although it will not be able to enjoy the improvements.
The use of NVMe as a connectivity standard for all devices opens the door to a possible future disappearance of the SATA connector. Although today’s hard drives are far from the 560MB / s speeds that SATA SSDs can achieve, it will not be uncommon for those speeds to be exceeded in the future. Seagate has already introduced the world’s first dual-actuator hard drive with SSD speeds, reaching up to 550MB / s speed. Therefore, the need for a new standard is increasingly clear. What we do not know is whether in the future there will be a new connector capable of integrating this new interface, but it would be the most logical thing to do, even if it were forcing the use of converters as had to be done during the transition between IDE and SATA to be able to use hard drives. ancient.
