News - WD: world's first demonstration of PCI Express hard drives

[crossy]

[But I seem to remember that the Black2 got a (deserved?) slagging because of the hoops you had to jump through to use it.] Does sound like that limitation is gone though

Afraid not, this PC World review says

The SSD appears automatically when you attach the drive and boot up, but you must install a software driver to access the hard drive. This makes the Black2 unsuitable for NAS boxes and RAID. It is also not supported on the Mac OS.

and ExpertReviews says:

You don’t need Acronis True Image if you simply reinstall Windows from scratch, but the software driver is essential, as without it only the 120GB SSD part of the Black2 will be visible to Windows. The driver is compatible with Windows 8.1 and Windows versions as old as XP, but a Mac-compatible version isn’t yet available. Western Digital warns that the driver isn’t compatible with computers that use an Nvidia or ASmedia storage controller, or with storage controllers set to RAID mode instead of EIDE or AHCI, but this shouldn’t be a problem on the vast majority of modern laptops.

And I think I'd really agree with that last bit - the Black^2 is really designed for single bay portables - given it's poor performance (relative to other bulkier solutions) I can't see ANY reason that you'd want to use this in a desktop.

Oh, and I think we (Hexus folks) were pretty negative about it when the press release was discussed here towards the end of last November.

[failquail]

Afraid not, this PC World review says

and ExpertReviews says:

Those reviews are for the older Black2, not this new SATAe version

[HolyOne]

This seems great for NAS.
Using the same channel to rack 3 or 4 HDD and lowering power consumption with it.
Love it!

[crossy]

Those reviews are for the older Black2, not this new SATAe version

So, have you got firm info that the change in connection also removes that (daft!) restriction of needing a special driver? Seems possible because - as I understand it - the limitation of the Black2 was due to the way that the SATA connection was handled.

This seems great for NAS.
Using the same channel to rack 3 or 4 HDD and lowering power consumption with it.
Love it!

I'd love to know how you figure that! Seems a bit self-defeating to have a super high speed connection and then throttle it with moving that data over a LAN. On the other hand if you're meaning "SAN" for NAS then I'd won't disagree too much.

Or were you talking about the Black2?

[abaxas]

Ermm... why not improve the technology?

Hard disks are going nowhere and even at current rates it's going to be 4-5 years before SSD are price equivalent with today's hard disks. If HD sizes do increase it could be 6-8 years before this happens.

Or maybe the other option, it might not even happen at all.

Speed isn't everything, using the correct product for the job, is.

[failquail]

So, have you got firm info that the change in connection also removes that (daft!) restriction of needing a special driver? Seems possible because - as I understand it - the limitation of the Black2 was due to the way that the SATA connection was handled.

As i linked before: http://techreport.com/news/26563/wd-...with-128gb-ssd

Special drivers are required to see the Black²'s mechanical component, though. The SATAe prototype uses standard AHCI drivers, suggesting its tag-team implementation is more refined.

Seems fairly firm info that it doesn't need special drivers

[Biscuit]

This technology is a waste of time. Look at the thunderbolt cable and speeds and then look at this again. Tell me the sense in it?
I won't be buying into it, something more sensible won't be far behind. "Ribbon" cables can do one!