CompTIA Server+ SK0-005 Practice Question

The correct answer is to install a high-performance NVMe SSD on a PCIe adapter card. The Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol is specifically designed for solid-state drives to communicate directly with the CPU over the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus. This architecture bypasses the older SATA and SAS protocol stacks, resulting in significantly lower latency and higher bandwidth, which is ideal for a high-transaction database. Given the server has available PCIe 4.0 slots, an NVMe SSD can leverage this direct, high-speed connection to overcome the existing SATA bottleneck.

• Installing a SAS HBA and SAS SSDs is a plausible but less optimal choice. While SAS is a robust enterprise interface and the HBA uses a PCIe slot, the SAS protocol introduces more overhead and latency compared to NVMe. For the absolute highest performance, NVMe is superior.
• Upgrading the SATA controller and drives would provide an incremental improvement at best but would still be constrained by the inherent limitations of the SATA III interface (6 Gbps), which the scenario identifies as the current bottleneck.
• Connecting storage via eSATA is not a viable solution for primary, high-performance database storage due to its own bus limitations and is generally not faster than modern internal interfaces.