NVMe Vs. SATA SSD: What's The Difference Between The Two Drive Types?

NVMe has the numbers, but SATA still has a few good reasons to stick around.

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While mechanical hard drives have clearly been superseded in performance by SSDs, there's still another decision to make when buying an SSD: SATA or NVMe. Both store data on flash memory and will feel much faster than an old spinning hard drive. But they are distinct in how they communicate with your computer.

SATA is the older standard and its SATA III specification has a theoretical maximum of 600 MB/s, although fast consumer drives generally run around 500 to 560 MB/s. NVMe (short for Non-Volatile Memory Express) was built specifically for solid-state storage and normally communicates over PCIe. That design helps explain why even an older PCIe Gen3 drive can achieve speeds of about 3,500 MB/s, while current Gen5 drives are closing in on 15,000 MB/s.

That puts SATA in a bad...

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