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 Reziac on Saturday November 13 2021, @02:15AM (2 children)
Here ya go, data-data.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2021/ [backblaze.com]
They have stats going back several years, but the results are usually about the same -- Seagates have the highest fail rate.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 13 2021, @06:36PM (1 child)
WDC had high failure rates too: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/ [backblaze.com]
For some reason Backblaze stopped using WD drives for a few years: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/ [backblaze.com]
I haven't had good experiences with WDC from that era either.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 14 2021, @01:10AM
Backblaze does whatever is cheaper for them. They will purchase drives that are less reliable or they suspect might be less reliable if they are cheaper, and the money they save is more than the cost of dealing with a higher failure rate in their data centers. Seagate is often the cheapest, so Backblaze will still buy them.
For personal use, random drive failures are annoying so it's worth the extra money to buy something that's not Seagate.