Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech

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    Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech


    Posted: 04 Jun 2014
    To keep up with ever-faster electronics, the computing industry periodically rips out the old way of doing things. Today, it's hard drive maker WD's turn to do some of the ripping.

    At the Computex tech show this week in Taiwan, the Western Digital subsidiary showed off a new hard drive that dumps the decade-old SATA connection technology and instead uses the faster PCI Express.
    Source

    A Guy
    A Guy's Avatar Posted By: A Guy
    04 Jun 2014



  1. Posts : 4,566
    Windows 10 Pro
       #1

    Man, And I thought sata would be around for awhile........I just can't imagine plugging hard drives into pci slots
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  2. Posts : 6,741
    W7 Pro x64 SP1 | W10 Pro IP x64 | W8.1 Pro x64 VM | Linux Mint VM
       #2

    SATA still seems pretty new to me, the last rig I built for myself from scratch had IDE drives and I had to get my head round SATA on my next custom built rig bought from a store. I can't see it being a problem other than I have more SATA ports than PCI-e slots, and it will make cable management a bit more 'interesting'.
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  3. Posts : 173
    Win7 64
       #3

    Now I thought the pci-e slots were for pci-e cards,,,,
    That's why they are lined up to plug a card in for external use.
    And the amount of pci-e slots were limited.

    hmmm
    could make it interesting on a mini-itx pcb, and pci-e hdd's

    I hope the pcb manufactures know about this revelation........ ie no sata connectors only pci-e slots?


    second thought..
    I didn't know the SSD/HHD's have passed the bandwidth capability of Sata2 yet?
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  4. mjf
    Posts : 5,969
    Windows 7x64 Home Premium SP1
       #4

    Show me a bandwidth bottleneck with Sata 3 even using an SSD.
    What annoys me is that CPU/motherboard generational changes are occurring too rapidly. We should be more focused on what do I really want to use a PC device for be it productive work or entertainment. Clearly some technology "advances" are there to serve the hardware/ OS software industries not the end user.
    Overall I don't think Windows 8 has been well received or Intel's Haswell CPUs. Now we await Windows 9 and the Intel Broadwell CPU.
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  5. Posts : 6,292
    Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium SP1
       #5

    My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.
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  6. Posts : 10,485
    W7 Pro SP1 64bit
       #6

    TVeblen said:
    My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.
    The SATA Express connector is shown on page 2:
    Asus Z97-A puts Intel's 9 Series chipset through its paces ? The Register

    The M.2 version is shown here:
    Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD Review (512GB) - New Ultra Standard Exceeds 140K PCMark Vantage Score | The SSD Review


    If this info is correct, then there are SSDs in the pipeline that exceeded the current SATA 3.0 limits late last year.
    As the speed of solid-state drives (SSDs) and hybrid drives increased, even faster data transfer rates were required between them and the host computer. As of the second half of 2013, high-end consumer SSDs have already reached the SATA 3.0 speed limit of 6 Gbit/s, requiring a faster host interface.[5][6]
    More recent info:
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06...ed_disk_drive/
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  7. Posts : 4,466
    Windows 10 Education 64 bit
       #7

    This type of tech is already out there ASUS ROG RAIDR Express PCI-E 240GB PCIe 2.0 x 2 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Newegg.ca
    It sounds like they want to take it one step further with a new connector just for SSD drives.
    Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech-20-785-002-ts.jpg
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  8. Posts : 49
    Windows 10 Professional 64bit.
       #8

    Slightly off topic


    alphanumeric said:
    This type of tech is already out there ASUS ROG RAIDR Express PCI-E 240GB PCIe 2.0 x 2 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Newegg.ca
    It sounds like they want to take it one step further with a new connector just for SSD drives.
    Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech-20-785-002-ts.jpg
    Ok I know this is off topic but after seeing alphanumeric's post I just had to.

    I've been keeping this thing around for nostalgia sake for a lot of years. Probably still has MSDOS 6.22 on it.

    For those of you too young to remember that interface is for an 8 bit ISA slot and was designed to work in computers that were built with no HDD interface.

    This one was in an 8086 IBM that probably weighed in at 70lbs.

    Capacity a whopping 10MB. Initial cost in the $1000.00 neighborhood.

    Funny how things come (sorta) full circle.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech-hardcard1.jpg   Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech-hardcard2.jpg  
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  9. Posts : 4,466
    Windows 10 Education 64 bit
       #9

    lol, my first real home PC motherboard had 6 ISA slots on it. That was it, there was no PCI. No onboard anything except one of those big 5 pin DIN keyboard ports. That meant an ISA card for Video, another one for sound, and a multi IO for floppy, hard drive and serial parallel ports. Oh and one for the modem and eventually one for NIC. That left one spare slot. MSDos and Windows 3.11. lol, something around about a 20 MB hard drive and 4 MB of RAM. < At the time. I'm not going to say when that was though.
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