NVMe is a storage protocol designed specifically with SSDs in mind. With the elimination of the intermediating SATA HBA layer, NVMe allows SSDs to communicate directly with the CPU via the PCIe Bus, opening channels for groundbreaking performance improvements. To put it into perspective, the performance limit of the SATA III Bus is 6 Gb/s, meaning a SATA SSD can offer a max of 550 MB/s of throughput after overhead. A single PCIe 3.0 lane can offer 1 GB/s (bidirectional) of throughput, so a PCIe 3x4 SSD can reach a throughput of up to 4 GB/s read/write, which goes up to 8 GB/s (bidirectional) for PCIe Gen 4x4 SSDs. The performance limitation here moves from the protocol to the NAND media, which has been undergoing tremendous development in recent years, allowing manufacturers to squeeze the highest density and performance into the smallest form factors. Protocol latency is also greatly reduced with NVMe, due to the shortened and optimized datapath allowing lower latency than SATA/SAS. The management of queues in NVMe devices is also handled more efficiently by the CPU due to the I/O processing doorbell signaling which significantly reduces CPU overhead. In addition, NVMe devices are supported by most major operating systems due to the massive development effort that was undergone in the past decade.