WD has recently presented its latest storage drive at the 2015 Storage Visions conference. The prototype was fashioned with a SATA Express PCI-e interface, 4TB 3.5-inch hybrid hard drive, and a 128GB solid state drive. The company reported that using the interface resulted in a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4,459 – almost akin to that of regular SSDs.
“WD is committed to working with the industry to push the boundaries of what you might expect from a traditional hard drive,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president, Storage Technology, WD. “By moving to PCI Express, the industry marries the world’s most popular storage bus with the world’s most popular computer bus. This union provides a solid growth path to innovate new capability, while preserving the ability to plug legacy SATA drives into new SATA Express based computers.”
“WD’s culture is one of strong collaboration with industry partners in a rapidly changing environment,” said Gary Meister, senior vice president of engineering, WD. “We see the industry moving toward simplification of the overall PC subsystem to a single storage bus based around the PCIe protocol. In this demo, we placed a hard drive, flash NAND and SATAe technology into one package, freeing up one slot in the system and simplifying how our customers could create and maintain such an advanced storage solution. When our customers ask us to move to the next storage bus, we will have done all the necessary work to be ready to support the move.”
“ASRock is delighted to show speeds of almost 10 Gbit-per-second when RAID striped off of two WD prototype drives,” said James Lee, vice president of ASRock sales and marketing of ASRock. “ASRock is on the forefront of creating new systems and architectures that break through classical bottlenecks.”
“Gigabyte demonstration will show how a WD prototype SATAe drive enables world class gaming experience,” said Jackson Hsu, product planning division manager of Gigabyte. “Included in our demonstration is work we have done with WD to make the combination of a hard disk drive and a flash subsystem look like a single volume to the end user. This allows the power of having separate devices in a system along with the convenience of having only a single drive to manage.”