What's the real speed of NVMe?

Anon

I saw a lot of benchmark (mostly VPS) and there were almost no difference between SSD and NVMe speed in yet-another-bench-sript. But people still instist that NVMe is way better and you have to use NVMe if you want your site working faster. Is it still true?
For example:

This is NVMe
Block Size | 4kb           (IOPS) | 64kb          (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 127.80 MB/s  (31.9k) | 1.73 GB/s    (27.0k)
Write      | 128.13 MB/s  (32.0k) | 1.74 GB/s    (27.2k)
Total      | 255.93 MB/s  (63.9k) | 3.47 GB/s    (54.2k)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512kb         (IOPS) | 1mb           (IOPS)
  ------   | -----          ----  | ---            ----
Read       | 3.21 GB/s     (6.2k) | 3.27 GB/s     (3.1k)
Write      | 3.38 GB/s     (6.6k) | 3.49 GB/s     (3.4k)
Total      | 6.59 GB/s    (12.8k) | 6.76 GB/s     (6.6k)

---

This is SSD
Block Size | 4kb           (IOPS) | 64kb          (IOPS)
   ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 120.22 MB/s  (30.2k) | 1.69 GB/s    (26.8k)
Write      | 120.25 MB/s  (30.2k) | 1.69 GB/s    (26.8k)
Total      | 240.47 MB/s  (60.4k) | 3.38 GB/s    (53.6k)
                   |                      |
Block Size | 512kb         (IOPS) | 1mb           (IOPS)
  ------   | -----          ----  | ---            ----
Read       | 3.29 GB/s     (6.3k) | 3.17 GB/s     (3.1k)
Write      | 3.41 GB/s     (6.5k) | 3.28 GB/s     (3.4k)
Total      | 6.70 GB/s    (12.8k) | 6.76 GB/s     (6.5k)

Yes I know it also depends on how many clients split the disk but...

deank

Sigh, benchmark junkies.

Use common sense and perhaps a little bit of logic.

comi

For the sake of this discussion ssd and nvme only differ in the way they connect to the system: sas/sata vs pci.

This means if you are not reaching the limits of sata you won't see the difference.

Harambe

Both of the results you posted are most definitely hitting a ram cache.

NVMe is a bit of a safer bet that you will have the iops available even after the node is loaded up. A well managed box with SSD storage at a good provider can work as well/better though. All comes down to how noisy your neighbors are.

comi

see also:

SATA Express (/ˈseɪtə/) (abbreviated from Serial ATA Express and sometimes unofficially shortened to SATAe) is a computer bus interface that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, initially standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification.[1] The SATA Express connector used on the host side is backward compatible with the standard SATA data connector,[2] while it also provides two PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device.[3]

Instead of continuing with the SATA interface's usual approach of doubling its native speed with each major version, SATA 3.2 specification included the PCI Express bus for achieving data transfer speeds greater than the SATA 3.0 speed limit of 6 Gbit/s. Designers of the SATA interface concluded that doubling the native SATA speed would take too much time to catch up with the advancements in solid-state drive (SSD) technology,[4] would require too many changes to the SATA standard, and would result in a much greater power consumption compared with the existing PCI Express bus.[5][6] As a widely adopted computer bus, PCI Express provides sufficient bandwidth while allowing easy scaling up by using faster or additional lanes.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express

vish

Yes

havoc

Those numbers seem unlikely - even the gen 4 pcie drives are like 5 gb/s max. Well the consumer tech anyway

FlamingSpaceJunk