WD Demonstrates “World’s Fastest 4TB Hybrid Drive”

WD, demonstrates the world’s fastest 4TB hybrid drive at the SATA-IO booth  at Storage Visions 2015, January 4 to 5 in Las Vegas, NV.

Prototype drive utilizes the SATA Express PCIe interface, 4TB 3.5-inch hybrid HDD, and up to 128GB solid state drive to deliver compelling performance and gigabyte-per-dollar solutions for desktop and gaming applications.  

The two WD SATA Express interface demonstrations at Storage Visions 2015 will include commercially available motherboards from WD partners ASRock, Inc. and GIGA-BYTE Technology Co., Ltd. These systems will demonstrate cabled SATA Express PCIe interconnect flexibility and configuration options for single-volume caching and RAID.

Heavy desktop usage scenarios will benefit from larger cache sizes (64GB will be demonstrated) by enabling retention of key hot data across multiple applications, which improves overall performance. In WD’s labs, WD’s SATA Express 4TB drive with 64GB cache achieved a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4,459, demonstrating near-SSD performance at an optimized gigabyte-per-dollar value.

PCMark8 benchmark data collected on Asus Z97-A platform, core i5 3.4GHz, 16GB DRAM
GB/$ calculations based on Dec14 retail price sampling

“WD is committed to working with the industry to push the boundaries of what you might expect from a traditional HDD,” said Matt Rutledge, SVP, storage technology, WD. “By moving to PCIe, the industry marries the world’s most popular storage bus with the world’s most popular computer bus. This union provides a solid growth path to innovate new capability, while preserving the ability to plug legacy SATA drives into new SATA Express based computers.“

“WD’s culture is one of strong collaboration with industry partners in a rapidly changing environment,” said Gary Meister, SVP of engineering, WD. “We see the industry moving toward simplification of the overall PC subsystem to a single storage bus based around the PCIe protocol. In this demo, we placed a HDD, flash NAND and SATAe technology into one package, freeing up one slot in the system and simplifying how our customers could create and maintain such an advanced storage solution. When our customers ask us to move to the next storage bus, we will have done all the necessary work to be ready to support the move.”

“ASRock is delighted to show speeds of almost 10Gb/s when RAID striped off of two WD prototype drives,” said James Lee, VP of sales and marketing, ASRock. “ASRock is on the forefront of creating new systems and architectures that break through classical bottlenecks.”

“Gigabyte demonstration will show how a WD prototype SATAe drive enables world class gaming experience,” said Jackson Hsu, product planning division manager, Gigabyte. “Included in our demonstration is work we have done with WD to make the combination of a HDD drive and a flash subsystem look like a single volume to the end user. This allows the power of having separate devices in a system along with the convenience of having only a single drive to manage.”