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back to article PCIe hard drives? You read that right, says WD

WD will demo PCIe-connected disk drives at the Computex tech conference in Taipei, using a SATA Express interface. SATA Express has been enabled with partners, and is offered on Intel series-9 chipset motherboards. WD says it provides a route to faster speeds and lower power consumption. SATA revision 3.2 delivers 16Gbit/s. …

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  1. Arnold Lieberman
    Coat

    The 1980's called

    They want their hardcards back...

    Mine's the one with the 20Mb MFM drive in the (deep) pocket.

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    1. stucs201
      Reply Icon

      Re: The 1980's called

      Beat me to it, though in my case it was a 32Mb RLL unit. Yes it was a WD.

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      1. Fading
        Reply Icon

        Re: The 1980's called

        Takes me back - had a 30MB hard card in my PC 1640 (5.25 and 3.5 DD took up the drive bays in the front). Add and adlib card and game card (for analogue joysticks) and that was my Amstrad's three 8bit ISA slots maxed out......

        EGA wing commander at 8 MHz was a bit of a lag fest........

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      2. Stuart Castle Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: The 1980's called

        I remember one company I worked for had one of those. When I saw it, I thought "32 meg? Wow. How am I ever going to fill that?". How times have changed. The browser I am using is probably using more than 32 meg of RAM while I'm typing this.

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    2. Levente Szileszky
      Reply Icon

      Re: The 1980's called

      Yeah, MFM came into my mind too... hopefully these won't be as heavy as those old bricks were. :)

      0 0
  2. Lionel Baden

    Whatever next? Direct Fibre Channel connections?

    I never really understood why they just dont go via this route and over engineer the connection and wait for the hardware to catchup,

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    1. Sureo
      Reply Icon

      Re: Whatever next? Direct Fibre Channel connections?

      Ah but then they wouldn't be able to sell you new hardware every year.

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    2. Frank Rysanek
      Reply Icon

      Re: Whatever next? Direct Fibre Channel connections?

      FibreChannel disk drives have been around for a very long time (perhaps no more).

      This question twisted my brain into a "back to the future" dejavu.

      http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/3331-fc-al-interface/

      http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/439F4FF2F546AE4F86256E4400673C67/$file/10K300_FC-AL_Functional_v.6.pdf

      Ahh right - don't expect a duplex LC optical socket on the drive, that "direct to drive" flavour of FC-AL was wired into an SCA connector and ran over a copper PHY...

      1 0
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Stop!

    SATA’s fastest speed is 12Gbit/s currently. PCIe v4.0 provides 1,969 MB/sec per lane. Gen 3 provided 985 MB/sec per lane.

    One unit of measurement PLEASE!

    11 0
    1. Captain Scarlet
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Re: Stop!

      My preferred measure is pints of Ale, or if its something on the floor Crunchie bars (Because they are easier to get to than my tape measure which always decides to disappear when I require it)

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    2. John Miles
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: One unit of measurement PLEASE!

      Just wondering what standard reg speed unit would be? 1 full size Paris Hilton picture per minute?

      1 0
    3. killakrust
      Reply Icon

      Re: Stop!

      Yeah kinda annoyed me too. I looked it up. A v4 PCIe lane is roughly 16Gbit/s. A 16 lane connection would be 256Gbit/s (or 32GB/s... nice).

      1 0
    4. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Stop!

      What is the fastest SATA file transfer you've ever seen? 12GB/s? That's garbage. Best I've seen is 1GB with a PCIe RevoDrive. Some imaginative folks working on the SATA standard.

      0 4
      1. no-one in particular
        Reply Icon

        Re: Stop!

        Mixing up your bits and bytes?

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      2. Robert Sneddon
        Reply Icon

        Samsung on Youtube

        Samsung put a Youtube ad up several years ago where their engineers RAIDded 24 SSDs (probably SATA-2 devices) and got 2 GB/s sustained throughput.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8

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    5. Fuzz
      Reply Icon

      Re: Stop!

      Also isn't the fastest SATA speed 6Gb/s? To get to 12Gb/s you need SAS.

      1 0
    6. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Stop!

      All right, all right - I've fixed the numbers to Gbit/s. We always try to publish as readable copy as possible, but sometimes in the heat of deadlines, things slip through.

      If you emailed corrections@thereg this could have been fixed hours ago :-(

      C.

      4 0
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Pint

        Re: Stop!

        My solution to this was to read it many hours late.

        3 0
  4. Zmodem

    whats the difference from just having a pcie sata expansion card besides the speed

    its a sound card for hard drives with its own onboard controller

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  5. Jim O'Reilly

    Pedalling a bike on the Nurburgring??

    You have to

    1 Ask why you would need such a fast connection on a snail-paced spinning drive

    2 Wonder why SATA isn't enough

    3 Ponder the presence of any spinning rust in the primary storage tier

    4 Suspect this is yet another ploy to have high-priced (and unnecessary) "enterprise" hard drives

    5 Predict that Ethernet drives will replace SATA anyway

    1 0
    1. Zmodem
      Reply Icon

      Re: Pedalling a bike on the Nurburgring??

      it would come in handy for storage at home, if you copy your blu rays from drive to drive, everyone boots windows up on SSD`s so you wont lower the 30 second boot

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      1. Zmodem
        Reply Icon

        Re: Pedalling a bike on the Nurburgring??

        sata 3 takes 20 mins to copy 15gb from drive to drive, a dual layer blu ray are 50gb

        most people have a SSD for windows only, and 6 other spin HDD`s for storage and games with 30mb textures if not using dds being read into ram without 30 mins level loading time

        0 0
  6. J.G.Harston Silver badge
    FAIL

    *higher* speeds, faster *devices*.

    2 0
  7. Doughboi

    80's Hardcards

    Wow...ya'll beat me to the punch.

    Hardcards = reminds me of my Amiga 500/2000/3000 days...

    2 0
    1. Myvekk
      Reply Icon

      Re: 80's Hardcards

      You forgot the original Amiga 1000!

      1 0
  8. Craig Cruden

    How about just using Thunderbolt

    Thunderbolt is already a PCIe interconnect using cabling which runs at 10Gbps in the first generation and 20Gbs in the second -- with the next being 40Gbps. I can connect up two local computers on a local network using Thunderbolt and it far exceeds the speed of consumer grade ethernet. Thunderbolt is going to have much lower head latency-wise than ethernet or USB x because it is basically PCIe over a cable.

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