NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a transfer protocol that connects SSDs directly over the PCI Express bus instead of the older SATA interface. That delivers much higher data rates and, above all, far more IOPS at low latency — noticeably speeding up databases, web apps and AI data pipelines. The key distinction is local versus network-attached storage: local NVMe drives sit inside the same server for minimal latency, while network storage runs over the data-center network and is slower. Bthorio uses local NVMe on both cloud servers and the bare-metal server — for consistent, predictable I/O without a network bottleneck.