When NVMe™ drives first came out, we knew the performance would be superior, but questioned when they would be cost-comparable to SATA SSDs. Due to their initial cost, NVMe drives were used for enterprise applications that needed to take advantage of their high-performance characteristics. It didn’t take very long for NVMe drives to become cheaper than SATA/SAS SSDs in terms of dollars-per-IOPS. But now, we are starting to reach the point where they are not that much more expensive than SATA/SAS SSDs on a capacity basis. This GB vs. dollar comparison was driven home to us when we received the Western Digital Ultrastar® DC SN640 NVMe SSD in the lab for performance testing – it offers dramatic performance improvements over SATA/SAS SSDs and targets the mainstream enterprise storage ma
