NVMe VS SSD: What’s the Difference and How to Upgrade to SSD
What is an NVMe solid-state drive (SSD)? What's the difference between NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) and a solid-state drive (SSD)? How do I upgrade to an SSD without reinstalling the operating system? On Google, a large number of people are looking for these answers. You've arrived to the correct location. MiniTool will go over each of these points in depth.
Overview of NVMe
To figure out the difference between NVMe and SSD, it is necessary to know what NVMe is and its pros and cons. Besides, we will introduce several best NVMe SSDs in 2020.What Is NVMe
NVMe, short for Non-Volatile Memory Express, serves as a communication standard for SSDs. It’s known as a new protocol that’s used to access high-speed storage devices especially SSDs. At present, this new standard is widely used for many famous SSD brands like Samsung, Seagate, WD, and Intel. NVMe standard works as an alternative to the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) and ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) standards. It is a new optimized and highly scalable storage interface that can directly connect to CPU via PCIe lanes.Pros and Cons
With the NVMe design, your SSD is able to directly connect with the motherboard for data transmission. That’s why NVMe SSDs have faster data speed than many usual SSDs. To help you have an intuitive understanding of NVMe, we summarize its pros and cons as follow: Pros:- Make great progress in disk performance.
- NVMe can deal with 65,000 queues of data.
- Greatly improve the IOPS capacity of an SSD.
- Benefit from the automatic power state switching and dynamic energy management, the power consumption is greatly reduced.
- Have good compatibility with driver applicability among different PCIe SSDs.
- Compared with SATA or SAS-based SSDs, the NVMe SSDs require PCIe bus standard or new advanced interfaces such as M.2 or U.2.
- If you want to add an NVMe SSD to your computer with a PCIe slot, your operating system must support NVMe and the computer has M.2 form factors.
Best NVMe SSDs 2020
In this part, we will introduce several best NVMe SSDs to you. #1. Samsung 970 EVO Plus When it comes to the best NVMe SSDs, the first one that comes to mind should be Samsung 970 EVO Plus. This SSD is a perfect choice for those who want to enjoy the high-power efficiency, data security, and fast data transferring.
- Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB
- Interface: PCIe 3.0 x 4
- Form factor: 2
- Max sequential read: Up to 3500 MBps
- Max sequential write: Up to 3000 MBps
- Warranty: 5 years
- Price: start at $69.99

- Capacity: 280GB, 380GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1TB
- Interface: PCIe 3.0 x 4
- Form factor: 2
- Max sequential read: Up to 2600 MBps
- Max sequential write: Up to 2200 MBps
- Warranty: 5 years
- Price: start at $699

- Capacity: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB
- Interface: PCIe Gen 3x4
- Form factor: 2
- Sequential read speed: Up to 3100 MBps
- Sequential write speed: Up to 1600 MBps
- Warranty: 5 years
- Price: start at $54.99

- Capacity: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
- Interface: PCIe 4.0
- Form factor: 2
- Sequential read speed: Up to 3400 MBps
- Sequential write speed: Up to 3200 MBps
- Warranty: 5 years (with registration)
- Price: start at $119.98
NVMe VS SSD
What’s the difference between NVMe and SSD? There are 3 major parts that can help you distinguish NVMe SSD vs SSD. They are disk performance, transfer protocols, and bus standards.Real Disk Performance
When it comes to choosing an SSD, disk performance should be the first and most important factor. You may find the sequential or random speed of an SSD on the purchase page. For example, Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD can reach up to 3500 MBps read speed and 3000 MBps write speed. However, it’s just a theoretical number that reflects the maximum data speed. In reality, the transfer speed of an SSD depends on a specific drive. Do you want to know the real disk performance? MiniTool Partition Wizard can help you test disk performance with ease. It is a reliable tool that has helped lots of users to make a comparison about disk performance such as RAID 0 vs RAID 1, hardware vs software RAID, M.2 vs Ultra M.2, and so forth. As a fantastic partition manager, this tool boasts many other powerful features such as wipe hard drive and reinstalling Windows, format a drive, convert MBR to GPT, resize partition, etc. Free Download Buy Now Step 1. Connect the SSD to your computer and launch this program to get its main interface. Step 2. Select Disk Benchmark on the top toolbar.


Bus Standards
Bus is a transmission harness consisting of wires. It is very important for your CPU, memory, input, and output devices to transmit information. As an internal structure, the bus standard fundamentally determines the transmission speed between the SSD and the computer. To make a better comparison of NVMe vs SSD smoothly, it is necessary to check what bus standard of your SSD is. There are 2 common bus standards on the market. Each bus standard has its distinctive features.- SATA bus standard: Adopting serial connection mode, it is an external bus standard that is commonly seen on hard disks. With a SATA bus standard, your data will be read from hard disk to memory first, and then extracted to CPU for calculation. After that, the data will be written to memory and finally stored to hard disk.
- PCIe bus standard: It is an internal local bus standard that has a high-speed serial point-to-point dual-channel high-bandwidth transmission. With this bus standard, your devices will be allocated exclusive channel bandwidth. Besides, the connected devices won’t share resources with other devices.
Transfer Protocols
Transfer protocols determines the data transfer method. When data arrives at the SSD controller, it specifies how your data will be transmitted to the hard disk. To be specific, it determines how much data is carried in a transmission queue at one time, the size of data transmitted at one time, and so forth. The transfer protocols regulate data transmission rules. Different protocols work upon different bus standards. NVMe transmission protocol works on the PCIe bus standard. For the SATA bus standard, its data transfer protocol works on AHCI. Therefore, make sure that your firmware is PCIe/NVMe mode if you want to use an NVMe SSD. What’s the difference between NVMe and SSD? I believe that you already have known the answer. You can distinguish them according to disk performance, bus standards, and transfer protocol.How to Upgrade to SSD Without Reinstalling OS
After learning about NVMe SSD vs SSD, you may need to replace your previous hard disk with a better NVMe SSD. How to upgrade to SSD without reinstalling OS? MiniTool Partition Wizard can help you migrate OS to SSD without data loss. Here’s is a full guide for you: Buy Now Step 1. In the main interface, select Migrate OS to SSD/HD Wizard from the left pane. Step 2. Select Option B to copy the system required partitions only and click on Next to go on.



What’s Your Opinion
SSD vs NVMe: what’s the difference between them? You can distinguish them from 3 aspects – disk performance, bus standards, and transfer protocols. If you are searching for a guide to upgrading to SSD without reinstalling OS, MiniTool Partition Wizard can help you do that easily. We appreciate any ideas in the comment area. If you have any questions about this software, please send us an e-mail via [email protected].NVMe VS SSD FAQ
- Best NVMe SSD: Sansung EVO Plus
- Best PCIe SSD: Toshiba OCZ RD400
- Best M.2 SSD: Adata XPG SX8200
- Best U.2 SSD: Intel 750 Series
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