14 DAY TRIAL // NVM Express, NVMe for short, means Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI) and defines how solid-state drives (SSDs) attached through the PCI Express (PCIe) bus are accessed.
Designed from the ground up to take advantage of the low latency and parallelism of PCI Express SSDs, the interface can be used in “normal” PCI Express SSDs, as well as M.2 drives and SATA Express 2.5-inch units.
Thanks to using the PCIe root complex, SSDs wired through it can attain over 2 GB/s transfer speeds.
Little wonder that Micro-Star International is announcing full support for it. As of this moment, all MSI motherboards powered by the Intel X99, Z97 and H97 chipsets have what it takes to run NVMe-based SSDs.
This is owed to the latest BIOS update, though you'll need to be running either Windows 7 64-bit or Windows 8.1 64-bit for the booting to work.
We've included the company's full table of compatible motherboards below. Expect others to be added to the list as time passes.
As you can see, the list is quite long already. If you buy one of these things new, you won't need to do any BIOS updates yourself, but flashing the BIOS should be simple enough if you already own a platform.
