This question is very commonly asked when one is looking to buy a storage media. Like with most things in this world, there are trade-offs and rationales we have to make in order to make sure what we get has the most value. Today, we will be looking at some reasonings as to why we should choose one storage media over the other.

First and foremost, we have to understand the major differences between an NVME and SATA SSD. The first trade-off we would like to look at is the amount of storage each of these media types hold. Conventional SATA forms are able to provide greater amounts of storage as opposed to their NVME counterparts at a constant price. However, NVME holds a great lead in speed, with its unmatched capabilities in parallelism. That is, its ability to perform multiple actions simultaneously. As directly quoted from NVM Express, Inc; “The interface provides an optimized command issue and completion path. It includes support for parallel operation by supporting up to 64K commands within a single I/O queue to the device.” To give you an idea of how much faster an NVME is in comparison to a SATA SSD, NVME can deliver sustained read-write speed of 2000MB per second, whereas SATA SSD III is limited at only 600MB per second. The PCIe bus lanes really does give NVME an upper hand in IO operations.

But does that necessarily mean NVME is better than SATA? The answer is no. Apart from the quite expected price gap between the two technologies, SATA is also able to accommodate for both SSDs and HDDs, whereas NVME is only limited to the flash environments in SSDs. This makes SATA very versatile, alongside the high capacity which many might value over raw speed. Depending on the models of SSD you are looking at, a quick google search will show you the various prices for an NVME model compared to a SATA model.

With this, it can be quite obvious why the NVME grade is popular among the organizations that seek faster and more responsive applications and databases. However, SATA still stands as a formidable opponent, where its worthy cost and decent performance adds great value to it. Apart from that, NVME can sometimes be regarded as overkill. Users might not need the immense speeds that NVME has to offer at the expense of their wallets. Such a high cost for performance that might not be needed is quite unjustified for some users, and it really comes down to the specifics of your purpose in using the SSD. In spite of that, NVME prices are starting to decrease slowly but steadily, and giving it a second look might just be some value.

Regardless of whatever technology you want or need, Ever Higher Data Recovery Centre has got your back. With specialist working round the clock to ensure a smooth data recovery process when your storage media malfunctions. At EHDR, our expertise is well-rounded and potential uncontained.

EHDR, We Leave No Data Behind.