A system and method improve the performance of non-volatile memory storage by facilitating direct memory access (DMA) transfers between a remote host and a non-volatile memory based storage system, such as a flash memory based data storage device (e.g., a solid state drive (SSD)). In conjunction with reading from and writing to non-volatile memory storage, a memory buffer on the non-volatile memory system is allocated, and a read or write command is translated to point to the allocated buffer. Thereafter, read and write operations may be performed through a controller, such as a non volatile memory express (NVMe) controller, using remote direct memory access (RDMA) transfers, thus bypassing time consuming processor steps of buffering data to main memory and allowing bi-directional throughput to reach network and SSD speeds.