Ihave long believed that politeness is the death knell of progress. Not mentioning some aspect of a system design because you’re afraid you’ll put noses out of joint is a sure-fire way to a massive argument years down the line. Never mind the bruised egos, the offence taken or the principles discarded: often, the most hotly defended parts of a design or requirement are the parts you absolutely must understand. As my rule goes, always follow the sound made when things are swept under the carpet.
In this case, we kept being sent benchmarks by the software support house showing how amazingly fast its product ran when presented on a bleeding-edge gamer box. These days that means something with a Ryzen 9 CPU and a slot on the motherboard that takes an NVMe SSD. Those last two words are a dense thicket of acronyms to be sure, and a disappointment when you unpack it: non-volatile memory express solid state disk. NVMe is a terrible mess, because it describes a physical storage type while at the same time only being used to specify the protocol that talks to the hardware.
The reason I am waxing pedantic about this terminology is because it fails to describe the most important aspect of the device – namely, its maximum write-cycle count. When choosing any type of solid state storage, it’s extremely important to understand the limits
