What is NVMe?

• A. A type of hard drive.
• B. A networking protocol.
• C. Protocol over PCIe for SSDs, providing low-latency, high-throughput access to flash storage.
• D. A power management standard.

Answer: (C)

NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express. It is a protocol and driver interface designed specifically for accessing flash-based solid-state drives over the PCIe bus. By using a highly scalable command set with thousands of parallel I/O queues, NVMe minimizes overhead and latency, letting the CPU interact with storage more directly and efficiently. This is what gives NVMe-based SSDs their low latency and high throughput compared to older storage interfaces that were not optimized for flash memory. It’s not a hard drive type, a networking protocol, or a power management standard.