NVMe: The Fast Lane for SSDs?
Solid-state Disks (SSDs) have made a lot of news over the last few years with their high performance, and matching high prices. Simultaneously, several companies have released PCIe-based SSDs with very high performance. These PCIe-based SSDs require specific drivers unique to each SSD vendor, which has limited their adoption in comparison to SATA SSDs which can use a standard driver and can easily be dropped into just about any system.
To address this limitation of PCIe-based SSDs, the NVM Express Working Group has created the NVMe specification which defines the registers, command set, and feature set for PCIe SSDs, allowing standard drivers to be created. NVMe will allow reduced latency and cost in systems by allowing SSDs to be attached directly to the chipset or CPU via PCIe, in some cases removing the middleman of a host bus adapter. It will also take advantage of the existing base of PCIe phys, and their roadmap for higher data rates. More information can be found at http://www.nvmexpress.org.
David Woolf, Research and Development
Mariana commented:
One thing that would help for bmcehnarking is to have a bench to mark things on. Although I’ve recently started using fio to benchmark at your suggestion, I haven’t found a decent guide or baseline configuration to use, and I’ve gotten some weird results and errors that I don’t understand (such as fio exiting after 50ms even though it’s supposed to run for 100G or 1800 seconds). There doesn’t seem to be a community around this tool. Yes, everyone’s workload is different, but we can’t compare our benchmarks to yours unless we both post our fio configuration
