NVMe SSD's get FASTER

 Most of you know SSD's are way faster than spinning, traditional hard drives, as there is no moving parts, just memory chips.  Many of you are aware that NVMe is way faster than SSD's, as the SATA controller is bypassed and the I/O happens right on the PCI-e bus.  Now there is a newer generation of NVMe hard drives, and they have roughly double the speed of first generation NVMe drives.  This new speed is all thanks to the newer PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and NVMe 1.3 protocol.

HP EX950

Micron 2300

Toshiba KXG60ZNV

M.2 SATA SSD: Western Digital SA530, just to show some speed differential.

Samsun SM953 NVME, just to show more speed differential.

Also I really like cards like pictured below.  This particular one allows the use of both M.2 SATA (also known as NGFF) and NVMe.  To use a M.2 SATA drive one plugs a SATA data cable that would normally be used for a hard or optical drive into the card.   This card can be purchased from Amazon or Microcenter for less than $23 (make note if it comes with a heatsink or not). 

In my case I have an HP server that is old enough where it will not boot to NVMe.  Running a single SSD in a server can be difficult do to the logistics of the hard drive backplane/RAID controller etc.  Especially if that server is a 1 or 2U machine with a RAID card, and one would much prefer running the SDD by a controller other than the RAID controller.  More than once I have done sketchy things like using velcro to secure a drive where it was never intended.  This card addresses all of those issues.  This is especially imporant for those of us running ESXi v7, where it isn't really supported to have the OS running from an SD card.