Comparing the Effect of PCIe Host Connections on NVMe Drive Performance

With the rapid improvement of flash technology and the recent implementation of the Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) protocol replacing the SATA/SAS protocol, it is to the customer’s advantage to select NVMe SSDs instead of conventional drives to gain significant improvements to internal storage performance. However, to gain the maximum benefit of these new drives, it is important that the components and connections in the storage subsystem be properly selected.

This paper demonstrates why the use of x4 PCIe lanes is crucial to the performance of the NVMe storage subsystem and the potential performance impact when a reduced number of PCIe lanes is used. This paper is aimed at users planning to deploy servers with high performance NVMe SSDs. It is expected that readers will have an understanding of the basic concepts of storage performance benchmarking.

Introduction
Lab configuration
FIO test parameters
Test results
Conclusion

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Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• Drives