What Are NVMe Drives, and Should You Buy One?

ONE of biggest upgrade you can make to your PC is faster storage.

Back in 2016, I wrote in an earlier blog about Advantages of SSD over HDD. Since that entry the storage technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. We went from Mechanical Hard Drive storage to Solid State Drives to NVMe (Non Volatile Memory Express)

"Non-Volatile" means the storage isn't erased when your computer reboots, while "Express" refers to the fact that the data travels over the PCI Express (PCIe) interface on your computer's motherboard.

By attaching the storage directly onto the motherboard you've increased the data access speed bypassing PCI and USB data limits.

NVMe drives are much much faster than the SATA drives that have been around for years.

Lets check out a comparison: 

Mechanical Hard Drives: Top speeds of these drives are 80-180mb/s. Nothing really special to write home about here. Also, whether they were in a laptop or a desktop they had a tendency to heat up due to the moving components (platters, read/write head, spindle...etc)

SATA SSD: One of the fastest SATA SSDs---the Samsung 870 EVO---tops out at read and write speeds of about 560MBps.Thets a sweet spot for those involved in video editing.

The "New Kids On The Technology Block" - NVMe Drives: The speed of these drives are dependent on the PCIe slot it uses. 

The maximum speed for an NVMe PCIe 3.0 (aka Gen 3) is up to 350MB per second, while a NVMe PCIe 4.0 (aka Gen 4) SSD can hit up to 750MB per second.

Because of the bandwidth used, these little sticks are perfect for gaming and video editing.
NVMe drives come in a couple of different form factors. The most common of these is the m.2 stick, shown above. You can compare them to the size of a stick of gum.

 

The're 22 mm wide and can be 30, 42, 60, 80 or 100mm long. These sticks are thin enough to lay flat on a motherboard, so they're perfect for small form factor computers and laptops.

 

Installing a NVMe drive is very simple, but it is important to keep in mind that some SATA SSDs use this same form factor, so you'll want to pay close attention and make sure you don't mistakenly buy the slower drive. The Samsung 970 EVO is an example of an m.2 NVMe drive.

If you have the extra cash and the motherboard has the m.2 slot available, I'd recommend getting a NVMe drive. This will upgrade the performance of your PC and blow past the 550Mbps of the old SATA SSD limits.

(Updated 12/22/25)