NVMe SSD drives for Game Hosting

We utilise NVMe SSD drives for Game Hosting for all our new dedicated machine nodes that host our client's Game Servers providing you with the best best high performance hardware possible. NVMe isn't just fast, it's super-fast!

Why Citadel Servers uses NVMe drives

NVMe means performance, fast write and read speeds means means less latency for our clients, faster response times while in-game and quality of service. Below we will explain what NVMe actually is and how it compares to both a normal SSD or HDD with statistics.

What are NVMe SSD drives

NVMe SSD drives are the newest form of storage technology for both consumer and server environments, they provide the best performance in-terms of read/write speed, unlike normal SSD drives they use a new type of port connection which is directly positioned inside the motherboard called a "M.2 slot"

What does NVMe stand for exactly?

NVMe stands for NVM Express or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification. It was first developed in 2011 as a new technology It is a open logical device interface specification for accessing non-volatile storage media attached via a PCI Express bus. NVMe have only become more commonplace since 2017 in the server and consumer based industries.

NVM NAND flash memory

The acronym NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives, PCI Express add in cards and other forms such as M.2 cards. NVM Express, as a logical device interface, has been designed from the ground up to capitalise on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.

When did Solid state drives first exist?

The first SSD (solid state drive) was actually released by SanDisk in 1991. It had a 20 MB capacity and a $1,000 asking price. Due to the high price and low capacity, SSD didn’t really become commonplace until around 2011. Even then, usage was low due to the much smaller capacities and much larger cost compared to HDD.

How much faster is a NVMe Drive exactly?

We first started utilising NVMe back in 2017, before our competitors as we collocate our machines for game server hosting. NVMe as both a consumer and a server product was still fairly new to the market at this point. We did some benchmark testing back then and what we discovered was fascinating, SATA based SSD was always incredibly impressive because of it's solid state performance that it delivered vs the older HDD however NVMe read speed was achieving not just double the SSD rate but over 3x the rate of a standard SSD and 7x faster than a HDD. That's incredibly fast, that's impressive!

Read Speeds compared

Here you can see the percentages of read speeds up to 20000 MB/sec, you can see the NVMe drive is drastically faster compared to the much slower HDD presented here. Many of our competitors still use old Archaic HDD to run their gameservers. HDD are now only suitable for storage purposes due to their high capacity.

Hard Disk Drive (HDD) 243 MB/sec

Solid State Drive (SSD) 424 MB/sec

NVMe 1726 MB/sec

How we size up compared to our competitors for hardware performance

Citadel Servers Other Hosting Company Budget Hosting Company
Uses NVMe SSD Drives Yes Sometimes, most likely slower SSD Likely uses HDD still
CPU Clock Speed 4.0 GHz+ Minimum up to 5 GHz Slower 2.0 to 3.9 GHz [1] 1.0-3.0 Ghz [2]
RAM Memory Type DDR4 2000Mhz Min DDR3, Sometimes DDR4 DDR2-DDR3 [3]
DDoS Protection Best OK Unprotected [4]
Network Connection Speed 1 Gbp/s Typically 50-500 Mbp/s[5] 100 Mbp/s [5]
ECC Enterprise RAM Yes Sometimes No
  1. [1] We are aware most of our competitors are still using older CPU, typically higher threaded servers at lower CPU clock frequencies, this means they host more gameservers per machine but the speed is not very good which results in lower performance, frequency matters with game hosting.
  2. [2] Budget hosts typically run very old hardware, either hosted in a budget datacenter or self-hosted in their garage.
  3. [3] Budget hosts are known to use old DDR2 or DDR3 type ram which is very slow compared to DDR4
  4. [4] Typically budget hosts have no DDoS protection, if they get attacked with a DDoS attack their network will go down, which means your game server is going down.
  5. [5] Speed and quality of network is very important for stable connections, just because a host states 1 Gbp/s connection doesn't mean the download/uplink speed is 1 Gbp/s. With Citadel Servers all machines have a connection speed of at least 1 Gbp/s at minimum