You know, these days we are often presented with numbers with a whole lot of zeros. It's hard to put them into a framework we can grasp. I just thought of a way to (hopefully) put the scope of NVMe throughput into focus.
Those of us, who are old enough, remember what an encyclopedia, in paper volumes, looks like. What a volume weighs in the hand. We visited the library to use their volumes to research our school reports. How long would it take you to read the entire set of encyclopedia, do you think?
Well, Microsoft's Encyclopedia Encarta 2005 contains about 26 million words, comprised of about 40 million characters (according to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe...ze_comparisons). As straight text, each alphabet character can be represented by 1 byte. That new Samsung ver. 4 NVMe drive can read those words in their entirety, the entire encyclopedia, 175 times every second (seven billion / 40 million). NVMe is capable of reading an entire encyclopedia 175 times
every second. That's how fast it is.
Some may point out that these days each character is almost always graphical, and is made of dots so that it can have lots of extra things associated with it like font and type size and color - and all those things increase the storage size of each. And an encyclopedia has pictures and charts that are not comprised of letters of the alphabet. And that's all true. But, if you rendered just the words of Encyclopedia Encarta 2005 in a text editor - each character would take exactly 1 byte, and there are 40 million of them (give or take). Work with me here.
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