Testing Solution for NVMe 1.0C PCIe SSD

Flexstar Technology, Inc., provider of test and measurement solutions for storage technology manufacturers, has announced the first NVMe test systems and test suites for PCIe SSD.

NVMe is an open source, standardized, low-latency host driver and set that operates over PCIe Gen 2.0 and Gen 3.0 communication protocols. Previous generation protocol stacks were geared specifically toward the architecture of HDDs which led to longer transmission times in the issuing and sending of commands to the device. NVMe was designed to optimize the performance of next generation SSDs.

NVMe also enables variable device throughputs of up to 8Gb/s per lane through the specific PCIe lane architecture.

"With this NVMe testing solution our customers can bring their products to market with an assurance, of quality and reliability," commented Michael Bellon, Flexstar’s VP engineering. "Our NVME solution is available on Flexstar’s Environmental, Burn-in and Bench-top systems and is downward compatible to PCIe Gen 2.0."

NVMe includes the following features:

• Flexible command queue structure (64k queues with 64k entries each)
• Metadata about SSD specific performance is built into the standard
• Superior support for the SATA TRIM command to identify old data blocks that can be reclaimed by the device
• Executes commands in less than half the number of clock cycles when compared to other protocols.