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posted by martyb on Friday March 02 2018, @06:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-controllers-under-control dept.

Western Digital is beginning to use in-house controllers in its new NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs, but has confirmed that they do not contain RISC-V cores just yet:

Western Digital has announced their first client NVMe SSDs with their SanDisk 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. These drives are also the first to feature Western Digital's new in-house NVMe SSD controllers. This is a major shift in strategy away from third-party controllers (mostly Marvell) toward complete vertical integration.

The new SSDs are called the Western Digital SN720 and Western Digital SN520. Branding for these is a bit of a mess with the drives bearing the Western Digital name and model numbers that almost fit in with the HGST Ultrastar SN200 and SN260 enterprise NVMe SSDs, but the product information is on the SanDisk website and the target market is similar to that of SanDisk's business/OEM drives like the X400 and X600 SATA SSDs. Western Digital may be trying to unify and simplify their several brands, but it's a work in progress.

[...] Western Digital hasn't disclosed what kind of processor cores are used in their NVMe controllers, but they did confirm that these aren't using the RISC-V architecture—those products won't be arriving until next year at the earliest. The Western Digital NVMe controllers are probably using ARM Cortex-R cores like most SSD controllers.


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 02 2018, @01:57PM (2 children)

    NVMe is interesting but I just can't see the usefulness in removing the ability to locate your storage somewhere other than directly sticking out of the main board. It really just doesn't make sense to me unless you're trying to build as compact a device as physically possible, which is not always the case.

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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday March 02 2018, @08:45PM (1 child)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Friday March 02 2018, @08:45PM (#646616) Journal

    NVMe is more than just a form factor, it's a whole new storage interface that does away with the limitations of AHCA in SATA. A very important feature is parallel command processing to handle multiple threaded requests without locking. I see your point about storage location but with things getting smaller and higher in density, this isn't much of a problem. If Thunderbolt or similar becomes more widely adopted then you can expect to see NVM->Thunderbolt or USB adapters. I'm also certain USB attached storage will suffice for many as well.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 03 2018, @04:31AM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday March 03 2018, @04:31AM (#646835) Homepage Journal

      It's a pretty significant problem if you're building a desktop box. Half a dozen NVMe slots take up a whole lot more room on a motherboard than half a dozen sata ports and they have to be located somewhere that's not blocking air coming off the video card(s) or CPU.

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