# Why Indian Research Labs Are Switching to NVMe-First Storage
Five years ago, a research storage tier meant one thing: big arrays of 18TB SAS drives fronted by a modest SSD cache. That formula is breaking.
## The per-job math
For a genomics pipeline running 30 samples a day, the dataset fits in RAM on a single workstation. For HPC simulations iterating terabyte-scale intermediate results, IOPS becomes the bottleneck long before capacity.
## NVMe is no longer premium
PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 enterprise NVMe has dropped below ₹8/GB for tier-1 capacity. That is still 3–4× SAS, but when you factor in the servers you no longer need to spin up to work around I/O waits, the total cost of ownership inverts.
## Hybrid, not all-flash
Our standard research storage stack now looks like: - 100TB NVMe hot tier (RAID-10) - 500TB SAS warm tier (RAID-6) - Tape or object cold archive
Reads go to flash, archives go to tape, the warm tier soaks up the middle. It is boring and it works.