NVMe is short for Non-Volatile Memory Express. It is a new storage access and transfer protocol for solid state drives (SSD) using the PCI Express (PCIe) bus.

NVMe is a significant improvement over the previous standard protocol SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment).

While SATA emerged for spinning hard disk drives, it was also used for the first solid state disk drives. As SSD technology continues to evolve rapidly, the use of SATA to connect SSDs to motherboards has been found to result in several performance degradations. Thanks to this performance loss, NVMe technology was developed.

NVMe meets the faster read and write needs of today's applications. A SATA SSD is connected to the motherboard using cables, while NVMe communicates through the PCIe slots on the motherboard.