Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech

[A Guy]

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

 

[andrew129260]

Man, And I thought sata would be around for awhile........I just can't imagine plugging hard drives into pci slots

 

[Boozad]

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'.

 

[Iforgot]

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?

 

[mjf]

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.

 

[TVeblen]

My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.

 

[UsernameIssues]

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/2014/06/03/wd_demos_pcie_connected_disk_drive/

 

[alphanumeric]

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.

 

[datapod]

Slightly off topic

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.
View attachment 320677

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.

 

[alphanumeric]

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.

 

[TVeblen]

Sounds like you had the same 386-DX I had (with a 387 math co-processor!).

 

[OvenMaster]

Considering that my mobo is one year old, is still on the market, and sports an IDE port (which I'm using with a WD 160GB HD), I'm not terribly worried about SATA ports going away anytime soon.

 

[alphanumeric]

Sounds like you had the same 386-DX I had (with a 387 math co-processor!).

Yeah, I think it was a DX-33 (33 MHZ).

 

[Britton30]

@datapod, is the device in you picture just a HDD and its PCB?

 

[datapod]

@datapod, is the device in you picture just a HDD and its PCB?

"Hardcard is the genericized trademark for a hard disk drive, disk controller, and host adapter on an expansion card for a personal computer."

More @ Hardcard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Wenda]

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.

Heheh! Mine was very similar, an Osborne 386SX20 with 4 x 1mb RAM chips soldered to the board. A 256kb graphics card, and an 80mb hard disk the size of a shoebox. It didn't have a CD-ROM drive or a sound-card. I bought a sound-card (Soundblaster 2, 8 bit) but it never got the CD-ROM drive.

Remember how some of the early sound-cards had an IDE connector on them so you had somewhere to connect the CD-ROM drive? If you didn't have a CD-ROM you could hook a second hard disk to it.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.

The article linked in the first post in this thread shows a drawing of the new connector that will replace SATA ports. What will be needed are MOBOs and CPUs that will support more PCI-e lanes. I find 40 lanes to be too restrictive now, let alone when the new ports and SSDs come out.

 

[alphanumeric]

My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.

The article linked in the first post in this thread shows a drawing of the new connector that will replace SATA ports. What will be needed are MOBOs and CPUs that will support more PCI-e lanes. I find 40 lanes to be too restrictive now, let alone when the new ports and SSDs come out.

I've seen a few motherboards with a bunch full length PCI-e slots but some are actually only x8 or x4. You have to read the fine print to see what your actually getting. I'd like to see the spacing between some slots increased too. Put in a double width video card (or two) and you lose the use of the adjacent slot(s). Like a lot of PC tech, 40 lanes likely sounded like a lot when it was conceived.

 

[alphanumeric]

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.

Heheh! Mine was very similar, an Osborne 386SX20 with 4 x 1mb RAM chips soldered to the board. A 256kb graphics card, and an 80mb hard disk the size of a shoebox. It didn't have a CD-ROM drive or a sound-card. I bought a sound-card (Soundblaster 2, 8 bit) but it never got the CD-ROM drive.

Remember how some of the early sound-cards had an IDE connector on them so you had somewhere to connect the CD-ROM drive? If you didn't have a CD-ROM you could hook a second hard disk to it.

lol, at the old Sound Blaster cards. I had a box full of those at one point. And the audio cables that connected to your CD-ROM drive so you could play audio CD's on your PC. Sorry for taking this thread a bit off topic. When I see really cool new tech I can't help but think of the old days and what it was like then versus now.

 

[King Arthur]

Honestly, SATA had a surprisingly short run compared to its IDE/PATA predecessor. Color me surprised at this bit of news.