NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.

Version changes for NVMe, e.g., 1.3 to 1.4, are incorporated within the storage media, and do not affect PCIe-compatible components such as motherboards and CPUs.

[3] By its design, NVM Express allows host hardware and software to fully exploit the levels of parallelism possible in modern SSDs.

The previous interface protocols like AHCI were developed for use with far slower hard disk drives (HDD) where a very lengthy delay (relative to CPU operations) exists between a request and data transfer, where data speeds are much slower than RAM speeds, and where disk rotation and seek time give rise to further optimization requirements.

Specifications for NVMe released to date include:[7] Historically, most SSDs used buses such as SATA, SAS, or Fibre Channel for interfacing with the rest of a computer system.

High-end SSDs had been made using the PCI Express bus before NVMe, but using non-standard specification interfaces, or by emulating a hardware RAID controller.

[22][23] The first details of a new standard for accessing non-volatile memory emerged at the Intel Developer Forum 2007, when NVMHCI was shown as the host-side protocol of a proposed architectural design that had Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group (ONFI) on the memory (flash) chips side.

[28] The NVMe specifications were developed by the NVM Express Workgroup, which consists of more than 90 companies; Amber Huffman of Intel was the working group's chair.

[36][37] A Kingston HyperX "prosumer" product using this controller was showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show 2014 and promised similar performance.

In March 2014, the group incorporated to become NVM Express, Inc., which as of November 2014[update] consists of more than 65 companies from across the industry.

NVM Express, Inc. is directed by a thirteen-member board of directors selected from the Promoter Group, which includes Cisco, Dell, EMC, HGST, Intel, Micron, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, PMC, Samsung, SanDisk and Seagate.

[41] In September 2016, the CompactFlash Association announced that it would be releasing a new memory card specification, CFexpress, which uses NVMe.

A HHHL NVMe solid-state drive card is easy to insert into a PCIe slot of a server.

At a high level, the basic advantages of NVMe over AHCI relate to its ability to exploit parallelism in host hardware and software, manifested by the differences in command queue depths, efficiency of interrupt processing, the number of uncacheable register accesses, etc., resulting in various performance improvements.