NVMe is a protocol designed for SSDs that operates over which interface?

• A. PCIe.
• B. SATA.
• C. USB.
• D. Thunderbolt.

Answer: (A)

NVMe is designed to run over PCIe because PCIe provides a direct, low-latency, high-bandwidth connection to the CPU that fits NVMe’s need for many parallel I/O operations. PCIe supports multiple queues and large queue depths with minimal overhead, allowing flash SSDs to deliver high IOPS and low latency. SATA uses AHCI and was built for HDDs, with far fewer queues and higher overhead, which prevents NVMe from achieving its performance. USB and Thunderbolt are general external interfaces with additional protocol layers and overhead that aren’t optimized for the native NVMe memory interface. So the intended transport for NVMe devices is PCIe.