Seagate Unveils World’s First HDD with PCIe NVMe Interface

Seagate showcased the industry’s first hard drive with a PCIe NVMe connection. Like solid state drives, this hard drive uses the NVMe protocol to run smoothly. Using a single protocol for different types of storage devices will greatly simplify data centers.

The experimental HDD has a proprietary Seagate controller that supports all three major protocols including SAS, SATA, and NVMe via a native NVMe port.

Modern HDDs can barely saturate a PCIe 2.0 lane, but future HDDs promise to be much faster, so 6 Gbps provided by a SATA port or 12 Gbps offered by SAS might not be enough. To that end, the industry has to think about future interfaces for connecting hard drives, and PCIe seems like a natural choice. Also, as SSDs are gaining traction in data centers, the NVMe protocol is becoming ubiquitous, so it makes sense to adopt it for HDDs.

But the adoption of PCIe-connected hard drives will take a long time. Seagate says the first samples will be available to some customers in September 2022, almost a year from now. Commercial PCIe / NVMe hard drives will only be available in mid-2024.

The first commercial PCIe hard drives are expected to use the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording technology, and will have a capacity of between 30 TB and 40 TB.

What do you think about the implementation of the NVME protocol on hard drives? Do you think that in the future it would be best to unify all storage devices under this protocol?

Source: Tom’s Hardware