NVMe SSD Is Now Mainstream in Notebooks

Post date: Jan 15, 2018 7:57:31 AM

This post is to share an industry trend that I observed first hand.

NVMe is such a new technology that it is a mystery to most people.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

"NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open logical device interface specification for accessing non-volatile storage media attached via a PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The acronym NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is commonly flash memory that comes in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs). NVM Express, as a logical device interface, has been designed from the ground up to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of flash-based storage devices, mirroring the parallelism of contemporary CPUs, platforms and applications."

In short, NMVe replaces SATA and SAS, which are built for rotating hard drives, with specification to exploit the performance of solid state storage.  That includes having over 65,000 queues, with over 65,000 commands per queue.

In 2017 we sold a very modest number of Lenovo ThinkPad notebook computers.  These are various different configurations of T470, T470s, X270, X1 Carbon Gen5 and P50.  Only 22% of the ThinkPad sold are hard drive only.  These are all the base configuration T470.  The P50 has both SATA SSD and SATA hard drive.  All the other ThinkPad sold are NVMe SSD configurations.  In fact, T470s and X1 Carbon Gen5 are available only with NVMe M.2 SSD or SATA M.2 SSD, without the option of hard drive storage.

All the configurations sold are demanded by customers.  Customers are voting with their money for low latency NVMe SSD for their notebook computers, as NVMe M.2 SSD are affordable, at a few hundred dollars. The additional money spent gives very good value, gaining much better productivity from much faster OS boot and application load.  Therefore customers are going straight from hard drive to NVMe SSD, bypassing SATA SSD.

In contrast, customer adoption of NVMe SSD in the server market is less enthusiastic.  In addition to lack of familiarity with NVMe, NVMe U.2 SSD and NVMe PCIe card SSD are priced at thousands of dollars, which add greatly to the price of a server.  In fact, some customers buy servers with SATA SSDs offered by the server manufacturers.  Even though SATA interface has lower bandwidth, is half-duplex, and less robust compared to SAS interface, SATA SSDs are also priced lower than SAS SSDs, which save a lot of costs with muilple SSDs and many servers.

NVMe SSD in servers are mostly used in specialized storage servers, where the highest performance, lowest latency storage devices are required.  Enterprise NVMe SSDs used in servers, have higher performance, longer write endurance and have protection against power loss, compared to NVMe M.2 SSDs used in client devices, and so are priced much higher.

Therefore, at this point in time, we have two constrasting situations in the client device and server market; NVMe is mainstream in notebook computers, while mostly being used only in niche applications in servers.  For now, the storage device interface in business notebook computers could be faster than that in many servers.