3.1 Modules and drives 3.1.1 NVMe storage NVMe protocol Industry-standard NVMe drives NVMe FlashCore modules IBM FlashSystem can contain three types of internal storage: NVMe FlashCore Modules  (FCM), NVMe flash drives, and SAS flash drives. The system is all-flash, spinning drives are  not supported and can’t be installed to its control or expansion enclosures. However, FS9100  can be clustered with Storwize V7000 family machines, which support them. FlashSystem 9100 control enclosure has 24 x 2.5” slots to populate with NVMe storage. NVM Express (NVMe) is an optimized, high-performance scalable host controller interface  designed to address the needs of systems that utilize PCI Express-based solid-state storage.  The NVMe protocol is an interface specification for communicating with storage devices. It is  functionally analogous to other protocols, such as SAS. However, the NVMe interface was  designed for extremely fast storage media, such as flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) and  low-latency non-volatile storage technologies.  NVMe storage devices are typically directly attached to a host system over a PCI Express  (PCIe) bus. That is, the NVMe controller is contained in the storage device itself, alleviating  the need for an additional I/O controller between the CPU and the storage device. This  architecture results in lower latency, throughput scalability, and simpler system designs.  NVMe protocol supports multiple I/O queues, versus legacy SAS and SATA protocols that use  only a single queue.  According to Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) publications as a result of the  simplicity, parallelism and efficiently of NVMe, it delivers significant performance gains versus  SCSI, such as: In addition to just IOPS and throughput, the efficiencies of the command structure of NVMe  also reduce CPU cycles by half, as well as reduce latency by more than 200 microseconds  compared to 12 Gbps SAS. FS9100 provides an option to use self-encrypting industry-standard NVMe flash drives, which  are available with capacity from 1.92 TB to 15.36 TB. Supported NVMe SSD drives are built in 2.5-inch form factor (SFF) and use a dual-port PCIe  Gen3 x4 interface to connect to the midplane.  At the heart of the IBM FlashSystem system is IBM FlashCore technology. IBM FlashCore  Modules (FCMs) are a family of high-performance flash drives, that provide  performance-neutral, hardware-based data compression and self-encryption. The current generation of FCMs is built with 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash technology and  Everspin MRAM cache in 2.5-inch U.2 form factor drive. GLYPH<SM590000> For 100% random reads, NVMe has 3x better IOPS than 12 Gbps SAS GLYPH<SM590000> For 100% random writes, NVMe has 1.5x better IOPS than 12 Gbps SAS  GLYPH<SM590000> For 100% sequential reads: NVMe has 2x higher throughput than 12 Gbps SAS  GLYPH<SM590000> For 100% sequential writes: NVMe has 2.5x higher throughput than 12 Gbps SAS 42  IBM FlashSystem 9200 and 9100 Best Practices and Performance Guidelines