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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: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 12 2021, @06:32AM (4 children)
Read the article, you get the impression they are using spinning rust, or traditional platter drives. Get into the article, you'll see
So, is this drive a traditional platter drive, and SSD, or some kind of hybrid with a proprietary connector?
Let's be clear: There are already NVME "drives" with PCIe interfaces. There are SATA and USB drives with PCIe interfaces. I'm not aware of any spinning disk drives with PCIe interfaces - the concept seems counter intuitive. No existing spinning platter can make full use of PCIe.
And, you'll still be spinning platters. I simply can't imagine that the platters will ever equal the various memory chips already out there, with or without an acuator.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 12 2021, @06:41AM (1 child)
It's an HDD. I replaced the typo just now.
They already got a 2-actuator 14 TB drive to 524 MB/s. Increase the capacity to the 30-100 TB range that is expected with heat/microwave-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR/MAMR), and double the actuators to 4, and 12 Gb/s SAS would not be enough.
Obviously, the point is not to equal SSDs. Those can reach absurd speeds like 26,000 MB/s [wccftech.com] or a lot more as NAND density increases in the coming years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 12 2021, @08:13AM
HAH! You didn't fix the typo at https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-demonstrates-hdd-with-pcie-nvme-interface [tomshardware.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Saturday November 13 2021, @01:05AM (1 child)
This allows a single interface for tiered storage (ram/ssd/HD array in the same storage enclosure).
I think in addition to performance, they want a single interface to simplify design and supply chain. (but also to keep an array of drives from hitting limits with SAS)
Then too, with SSD+ram on drive cache maybe there is a bit of single drive performance gain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15 2021, @09:33AM
There are also other benefits beside performance and having a single interface because NVMe was able to take advantage of technological and design improvements because they didn't have to deal with as much backwards compatibility or other restrictions brought by older buses/interfaces.