Seagate Demonstrates HDD with PCIe NVMe Interface
Seagate has demonstrated the industry's first hard disk drive connected to a host using a PCIe interface at the Open Compute Project Summit. Like solid-state drives, the experimental hard drive uses the NVMe protocol to operate alongside SSDs seamlessly. Usage of a single protocol for different types of storage devices will greatly simplify datacenters.
The experimental [HDD] is based on Seagate's proprietary controller that supports all three major protocols, including SAS, SATA, and NVMe over a 'native NVMe port,' and does not require any bridges.
[...] Modern HDDs can barely saturate even a single PCIe 2.0 link, but future multi-actuator HDDs promise to be much faster, so 6 Gbps provided by SATA or 12 Gbps offered by SAS might not be enough at some point. To that end, the industry has to think about future interfaces to connect hard drives, and PCIe seems like a natural choice. Furthermore, as SSDs are gaining traction in datacenters, the NVMe protocol becomes pervasive, so it makes sense to adopt it for HDDs. This is why NVMe 2.0 adds hard drive support.
NVM Express aka Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification.
Also at Phoronix.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday November 12 2021, @04:51AM (1 child)
I need RAM on NVMe too. 64T would be enough, for a while.
I could make a good use of this for a serious process long term memory without retention. Meanwhile, just waiting until gaming industry reinvents this concept for some other sinister purpose, like VR games.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday November 12 2021, @04:28PM
Have you considered Intel Optane? I'm genuinely curious of a real-world applications and availability. Synthetic benchmarks made the P5800x released this year look attractive, but it appears to have availability issues and I'm unsure if it has been adopted anywhere beyond storage enhancements.
https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-dc-p5800x-1-6tb/p/N82E16820167481 [newegg.com]