Seagate presented the world's first NVMe native HDD (HDD) at the 2021 Open Compute Project World Summit. This announcement may signal a future for HDDs that have become less sought-after due to SSDs and NVME M.2 drives' cost drop and storage capacity expansion.
The recently introduced HDDs come with NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) through PCIe 3.0 rather than the conventional SATA (Serial AT Attachment) connection. While Internal Hard Drives may be slow compared to SSDs and even slower than NVMe M.2 SSDs, they will only be going out of fashion for a short time since they are a reasonable cost for masses of storage. However, NVMe HDDs could make SATA hard drives shortly since they significantly improve the speed of transfers.
This speed boost is pretty good, too! The ability to support HDDs was added only in version 2.0 of the NVMe protocol. The new version permits data transfer speeds reaching 4 GB/s when using PCIe 3.0 x4 or even 8 GB/s when using PCIe 3.0 4. Compared to SATA 3.0's relatively small 600 MB/s rate, It's easy to be overly excited over NVMe HDDs.
What Exactly Are HDDs Equipped With NVMe?
It is believed that the principal reason for the new drives is to standardize interfaces used by data carriers in the server space. Presently, SATA data carriers communicate with the SATA controllers of mainboards through the AHC interface. This interface does away with the requirement for drivers to install on western digital external hard drive individually. Furthermore, AHCI permits hot-swapping hard disks and allows native command queueing (NCQ). NCQ optimizes the performance of disks by the order of writing and reading commands into the buffer.
While SATA's AHCI standard and features like NCQ have made SATA the perfect enterprise and home option for nearly twenty years, its technology has become old-fashioned. Commands for control in NCQ have been developed explicitly to mechanical write and read heads on HDDs instead of quicker flash-based storage devices. This mismatch with technology could cause a rise in the latency of SSDs that SATA connects.
NVMe is, however, equipped with an extensive set of features that can be used to optimize queuing performance for flash memory. It not only guarantees less time to process and faster in-output and output actions every second (IOPS) but also uses multithreading to improve the speed of the process.
The extended feature set revolves around the latest high-speed stat carriers used in massive networks, such as those used for servers.
HDDs Have A Future!
Don't toss out the old drives now. HDDs are in great demand, and their status stays the same for a while because they have significantly lower prices per MB; ssd internal hard drive will remain the norm for ample storage. While many gamers are using the M.2 SSD or an NVMe SATA SSD to run the purposes of Windows Boot/ game drive, moving to an NVMe whole storage array is unnecessary. Most games and applications, but with some exceptions, cannot use this speedy storage.
The NVMe drives currently are designed for the server industry, which is where high-speed storage is worthwhile for the price. The SATA interface will remain for a while but has yet to be.
No comments yet