NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express
Flash storage hung straight off the PCIe bus, with the kind of latency that makes a SATA SSD feel like a hard drive.
A storage protocol designed from scratch for solid-state drives, attached directly to the PCIe bus rather than going through the legacy SATA/AHCI stack. Supports up to 65,535 parallel command queues with up to 65,535 commands per queue. Latency is typically tens of microseconds, throughput several gigabytes per second per drive.
Every NordBastion plan is on data-centre NVMe, local to the host.
There is no SATA-SSD tier on the catalogue and there is no spinning-rust tier either. Every VPS and every dedicated server we sell is backed by enterprise-grade NVMe drives — typically 1 DWPD-class Samsung, Kioxia or Solidigm parts — sitting in the same chassis as the CPU that runs your workload. A small database does its random I/O in microseconds; a build server compiles at the speed the CPU allows, not the speed the disk allows.
We deliberately do not run a SAN or any kind of distributed block storage. The trade-off is honest: you get the best possible per-VM disk performance and the worst possible cross-host portability. A VPS lives on a specific hypervisor; if that hypervisor needs maintenance, we live-migrate the running guest to a peer host on the same network. There is no "your storage volume is now degraded because three nodes in the Ceph cluster lost quorum" failure mode, because there is no Ceph cluster.
The corollary is that backups are your job: a second VPS in another region, a private S3-compatible object store, an off-site rsync target. We document this on the VPS catalogue and again in the hardening guide. Local NVMe is fast and durable, but local means local.
The pages that lean on this term.
The questions people actually ask.
What is the difference between NVMe and SATA SSD?
Both store data on flash. A SATA SSD speaks to the host over the SATA bus using the AHCI protocol designed for spinning disks, capped at roughly 600 MB/s and a single 32-command queue. An NVMe drive sits directly on the PCIe bus and speaks a protocol built specifically for parallel flash — typically 3,000 to 7,000 MB/s sequential, tens of microseconds of latency, tens of thousands of parallel queues. For a database, a build server or any workload bound on small random I/O, NVMe is dramatically faster.
Is NVMe storage local to the hypervisor or networked?
On NordBastion, all VPS storage is NVMe local to the hypervisor — the drive is physically inside the same chassis as the CPU running your VM. We do not run a SAN, we do not run distributed block storage, we do not abstract storage behind a software-defined fabric. The trade-off is that we recommend running backups elsewhere (a second VPS in another region, a private object store) since local storage is local in every sense.
Does NVMe wear out faster than spinning rust?
All flash has finite write endurance, measured in DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) over the warranty period. We deploy data-centre-class NVMe drives (typically 1 DWPD enterprise-grade), monitor wear levelling and replace drives well before their endurance budget approaches the limit. For an average customer workload — a web server, a small database, a VPN — a modern data-centre NVMe will outlast the chassis it lives in.
Is the NVMe on a NordBastion VPS encrypted?
Many of our NVMe drives support hardware-level full-disk encryption (Opal 2.0) and that layer is enabled at deployment. For meaningful tenant-side privacy you should additionally configure full-disk encryption inside your VPS — LUKS on the root volume, or a dedicated encrypted volume for sensitive data. We document the recipe in the VPS hardening guide.