Seagate officially announced during its own event at the Open Compute Project 2021 that it is already developing the first hard drive that will work on the PCIe interface. The latest next-generation drive will use the NVMe protocol for data transfer, which is also used by modern solid-state drives. But the future HDD from Seagate has another interesting advantage – the drive will be based on a special proprietary controller that also supports SATA and even SAS protocols, which do not require additional adapters.
And although the development is still underway, the company decided during the exhibition to show how this technology will work – for this, Seagate specialists installed twelve 3.5-inch HDDs in a JBOD 2U server shelf, connecting the drives to a PCIe switch. This assembly has demonstrated its performance, but with certain limitations – at the moment, hard drives are capable of reaching the bandwidth of only one PCIe 2.0 lane. In the future, of course, the manufacturer will improve its HDDs, expanding their capabilities, plus the NVMe 2.0 protocol itself implies working with hard drives.
The company’s specialists are sure that a single interface, in theory, should significantly simplify the development of various hardware platforms, ultimately reducing their cost, but, on the other hand, the implementation and implementation of a new standard on the HDD market requires time and impressive resources. For example, Seagate announced that the first HDD models on PCIe NVMe will be presented to the corporate sector in September 2022, while mass production should start only in 2024. And, of course, at first the HDD data will be targeted at data centers, but models up to 40 TB can be installed in a regular home PC.
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