Here is the first PCIe NVMe HDD. Seagate showed off a unique plate disc

NVMe disks use PCIe lanes, while those with AHCI are based on SATA buses, offering up to 750 MB / s transfer, while PCIe 3.0 × 4 provides 4000 MB / s. So you can see the differences for yourself, so you can certainly imagine the potential of the first PCIe NVMe HDD from Seagate. These possibilities were unlocked by the premiere of the NVMe 2.0 specification.

Seagate unveiled the first PCIe NVMe HDD. This one is primarily to ensure wider compatibility

At the Open Compute Project Summit, Seagate demonstrated the world’s first hard disk drive connected to a computer via a PCIe interface. Exactly – it is about the same used by SSD on M.2 or PCIe, using the NVMe protocol. This experimental platter is based on a proprietary Seagate controller that supports all three major protocols including SAS, SATA and NVMe via a “native NVMe port”.

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The hard drive was demonstrated in a prototype JBOD 2U housing, which uses a PCIe switch that connects to twelve 3.5-inch drives via a PCIe interface. While current HDDs may be satisfied with a single PCIe 2.0 lane, future ones may significantly exceed SATA III’s 6 Gb / s or 12 Gb / s guaranteed by SAS. However, this experimental HDD was not created to impress with speed, but compatibility.

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Integrating HDD with NVMe will primarily simplify the hardware issue in data centers, where NVMe SSDs are gaining in popularity. However, it will take some time, because Seagate itself claims that the first samples of PCIe / NVMe HDD drives will be available to key customers only in September 2022, i.e. in almost a year. Commercial PCIe NVMe HDDs, on the other hand, will not be available until mid-2024.