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About LinkBacksRead more.ASUS, Gigabyte and others will demo these WD drives working with their new motherboards.
Read more.ASUS, Gigabyte and others will demo these WD drives working with their new motherboards.
I don't get the point in a SATA express HDD, SSD's are only just hitting SATA 3's max speed, with the newer SATA express SSD's basically just pairing two SSD's in raid !
Yeah, hard disks? Really? Maybe lower power consumption, but they weren't saturating the SATA 3 interface...
I think SSDs will benefit, as if their hardware controller is upgraded they should be able to reach higher speeds... Add more chips to them and you should be able to read/write more at once.
yay let's lose 2 sata ports to have a satae connection for a HDD...
At first glance it looks utterly pointless: a Sata express HDD?
But look a bit closer and notice it's a combination SSD/HDD drive, so it would actually make use of the extra SATAexpress speed with the SSD portion
3 X SATA = SATA express ?
Can I not just buy a SATA Express HDD and plug in 3 SATA cables ?
really.... I don't see the point in converting hard drives to sata express this with the current socket, it's just to bulky.
I've also never really seen the point in hybrid drives on a desktop pc...
...ever.Originally Posted by LSG501
They're hard drives, it's not as if even SATA2 is holding them back. They're 7,200 rpm rotational storage devices, they're just slow, and no amount of cache or bus speed bumps is going to improve their mechanical lameness.
It's a dual drive, like the black 2 they released a while back. It has a 4TB mechanical portion, and a 128 GB SSD. So I'm guessing you'll be able to access the full read/write potential of both drives at the same time over the one sata-e interface. Kinda cool if you have a 9 series board with sata-e.
Agree with you - that SATAe connection looks like something that someone bodged together with a molex and some spare edge connectors. Whatever happened to these grandiose plans that the next gen SATA connection would have unified power and data and a single cable - which would make cable routing a heck of a lot easier, and airflow correspondingly better?
Proper hybrid drives though I'm going to put my hand up as quite liking. Just replaced a woefully performing 1TB WD Black with a 1TD Seagate SSHD and the performance increase for the SSHD is staggering. Haven't done the CrystalMarks but some of the programs that launch on login are up about as fast as they would be on SSD hosting.
Great - in theory - if you have a really restricted case, such as an Ultrabook. But I seem to remember that the Black2 got a (deserved?) slagging because of the hoops you had to jump through to use it. Oh, and it was Windows7/8 only. My problem is that I don't have a case that is that restrictive, so I can accomodate separate drives - oh, and the 1TB+120GB combination can be had as SSD-only for about £400 - so that's "only" twice the price of the slower Black2.
Like others on this thread, I'm wondering what the heck the point of this PCIe interface is for a "spinning rust" disk? As far as I know the current SATA connections aren't exactly being pushed by all but the top end SSD's. Definitely think it'll be missing from my "must buy" list.
Last edited by crossy; 04-06-2014 at 03:33 PM.
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
Chicken and egg.
What is the point of designing an SSD controller that can sustain more than 500MB/sec if SATA can't cope. You just wouldn't.
So the interface has to be upgraded first, then wait for devices to start turning up again that can saturate it.
Perhaps more the question is whether we really need this? Just plug the damned SSD into a PCIe x4 socket and be done with it.
Fully agree there. The sata express cabling is a mess. I don't understand why they couldn't just use a single cable rather than three (plus a 4th power connection by the looks of it).
Does sound like that limitation is gone though
The 3.5" dual-drive config appears to be similar to the Black² notebook hybrid WD introduced in November. That drive combines a 1TB HDD with a 128GB SSD, each of which can be used separately. 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.
I see they are planning to make HDD cables fat again.
We're already some way beyond SATA3 on SSDs now, but I'd agree with you about HDDs - however these WD drives are SSD/HDD hybrid devices.
You'd think that they would have braided the cables together to make them look more tidy and modern.
Sata 3 has been holding back SSD's for the last couple of generations now to the point now that almost any decent size drive will hit the sata3 limit. Bandwidth isn't the only thing that can be improved latency could do with a nudge as well.
If read speed alone can saturate the interface i'd suspect simultaneous read and write (which is what hybrids will do) will take a big hit otherwise.
Maybe they should of called it sata 4 instead, except it's not backwards compatible so people might get confused.
I use a laptop with a pair of sammie 840 pro's in raid 0, 1GB/s read speed does make a difference. sure it's not the same leap between hdd and ssd but it's still a noticeable leap, windows 8.1 takes 2-3 seconds to load.
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