The 1980's called
They want their hardcards back...
Mine's the one with the 20Mb MFM drive in the (deep) pocket.
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. …
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........
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...
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
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
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.