Data Storage: It’s All Coming Up NVMe

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January 10, 2022

Data Storage: It’s All Coming Up NVMe

Published in Military & Aerospace Electronics
Written by John Keller

NASHUA, N.H. - Rugged data storage for military and aerospace applications have evolved quickly from rotating to solid-state media, such that for all practical purposes, solid-state data storage is the defacto choice today for defense systems integrators.

It’s come to the stage that rotating storage media rarely even are mentioned as alternatives to secure data storage in the military. “Just about everything we are doing now is based on solid-state disk,” says Amos Deacon III, president of president of data storage expert Phoenix International Systems in Orange, Calif. The rare occasions where rotating media are considered options, systems designers must take the time and make the investment to designed specialized ruggedized packages, Deacon says.

So that leaves designers with options in solid-state storage media, and today that overwhelmingly means Non-Volatile Memory Express, better-known as NVMe. “The biggest technical trend in recent years is the transition to NVMe for storage in many, if not all cases,” says Dominic Perez, chief technology officer at the Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense Solutions segment in Portland, Ore.

The biggest advantage of NVMe is pure speed, which for the vast majority of systems designers outweighs NVMe’s drawbacks in power consumption, thermal management, and ruggedization. NVMe’s speed is the biggest reason that it has surpassed in popularity other solid-state storage media such as Serial AT Attachment (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). SATA is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to data storage devices like hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives.

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