What NVMe is

NVMe is a communications standard developed specially for SSDs

by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Dell,
and Seagate. It operates across the PCIe bus (hence the ‘Express’ in
the name), which allows the drives to act more like the fast memory
that they are, rather than the hard disks they imitate. Bottom line:
NVMe is fast. Really fast. Like never-have-to-wait-again-for-your-
computer fast.

SATA SSDs vs. NVMe SSDs

Knowing well the ultimate performance potential of NAND-based
SSDs even when they first showed up, it was clear to the industry
that a new bus and protocol would eventually be needed. But, as the
first SSDs were relatively slow (and bulky), it proved far more
convenient to use the existing SATA storage infrastructure.

Though the SATA bus has evolved to 16Gbps as of version 3.3,

nearly all commercial implementations remain 6Gbps (roughly
550MBps after communications overhead). Even version 3.3 is far
slower slower than what today’s SSD technology is capable of,
especially in RAID configurations.

Sandisk
The Sandisk Extreme Pro offers the exact same performance as the WD
Black NVMe. Because, wait for it—it’s the same drive. The drive
uses four PCIe lanes for a theoretical maximum throughput of well
over 3GBps. 
As a replacement for the SATA bus, it was decided to leverage a
much higher-bandwidth bus technology that was also already in
place—PCI Express, or PCIe. PCIe is the underlying data transport
layer for graphics and other add-in cards.. As of generation 3.x, it
offers multiple lanes (up to 16 for use with any one device in most
PCs) that handle darn near 1GBps each (985MBps).

PCIe is also the foundation for the Thunderbolt interface, which is

starting to pay dividends with external graphics cards for gaming, as
well as external NVMe storage, which is nearly as fast as internal
NVMe. Intel’s refusal to let Thunderbolt die was a very good thing,
as many users are starting to discover. Even though Intel has shared
the technology with the USB forum to make it easier to implement,
it’s still rarer than one might hope.

Of course, PCIe storage predates NVMe by quite a few years. But

previous solutions were hamstrung by older data transfer protocols
such as SATA, SCSI, and AHCI, which were all developed when the
hard drive was still the apex of storage technology. NVMe removes
their constraints by offering low-latency commands, and multiple
queues—up to 64K of them. The latter is particularly effective
because data is written to SSDs in shotgun fashion, scattered about
the chips and blocks, rather than contiguously in circles as on a hard
drive. 

The NVMe standard has continued to evolve to the present version

1.31, with the addition of such features as the ability to use part of
your computer’s system memory as a cache. We’ve already seen that
caching employed by the super-cheap Toshiba RC100 we recently
reviewed, which forgoes that onboard DRAM cache that most
NVMe drives use, but still performs well enough to give your
system that NVMe kick in the pants for everyday chores.