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Western Digital to Demonstrate 4 TB Hybrid Drive at Storage Visions 2015

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WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in storage solutions, will demonstrate the world's fastest 4 TB hybrid drive at the SATA-IO booth (#205) at Storage Visions 2015, January 4 to 5 in Las Vegas, NV. WD's prototype drive utilizes the SATA Express PCI-e interface, 4 TB 3.5-inch hybrid hard drive, and up to 128 GB solid state drive to deliver compelling performance and GB-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 and Gigabyte. These systems will demonstrate cabled SATA Express PCI-e interconnect flexibility and configuration options for single-volume caching and RAID.





Heavy desktop usage scenarios will benefit from larger cache sizes (64 GB 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 4 TB drive with 64 GB cache achieved a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4459, demonstrating near-SSD performance at an optimized GB-per-dollar value.

"WD is committed to working with the industry to push the boundaries of what you might expect from a traditional hard drive," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president, Storage Technology, WD. "By moving to PCI Express, 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, senior vice president 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 hard drive, 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 10 Gbit-per-second when RAID striped off of two WD prototype drives," said James Lee, vice president of ASRock sales and marketing of 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 of Gigabyte. "Included in our demonstration is work we have done with WD to make the combination of a hard disk 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."

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Why is WD using a 128GB SSD still when the prices of 240/256GB SSDs are down to affordable levels now? Back when original Black² was introduced, prices of 240/256GB drives were quite high and it made a logical choice for the drive. But now when SSD prices have collapsed 128GB SSD doesnt make sense unless this drive retails for mere 50-75$ premium over regular 4TB Hdds.
 
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Remember how we had razors with one blade, then two, and three, four, jokes were made about five..... then five.

"Lets strap a SSD on a Hard drive, call it revolutionary and try to PR the SHIT out of it!!!"

Or.... we could just hope MS one day moves to a better file system like the promised us with Vista that would do the same work for us, frequently accessed files moved to the higher speed drive, larger files where contiguous reads and writes are as fast or faster than the processor can handle anyway moved to the mechanical disk. Use meta data in conjunction with file storage with a smart file system......nah better scrap that project, lets make Windows 8!!!
 

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Remember how we had razors with one blade, then two, and three, four, jokes were made about five..... then five.

"Lets strap a SSD on a Hard drive, call it revolutionary and try to PR the SHIT out of it!!!"

Or.... we could just hope MS one day moves to a better file system like the promised us with Vista that would do the same work for us, frequently accessed files moved to the higher speed drive, larger files where contiguous reads and writes are as fast or faster than the processor can handle anyway moved to the mechanical disk. Use meta data in conjunction with file storage with a smart file system......nah better scrap that project, lets make Windows 8!!!

We can't really blame WD for MS's decisions. I would say SSHD is the best thing that came out of storage technology in many years, other than SSDs getting cheaper by the day.
 

Aquinus

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I would say SSHD is the best thing that came out of storage technology in many years, other than SSDs getting cheaper by the day.
Maybe. My wife's new laptop came with one and while it does speed up booting and some applications, doing anything that requires a write it brutally slow. Took hours to install Windows updates because the HDD was pegged out. Hybrid HDDs aren't a bad idea, but they need to put more flash on them and cache writes to flash prior to putting it into HDD storage. I still would rather have an SSD over an hybrid drive.
 
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What bothered me with WD's last Dual Drive solution- Black2, was the boot sector is located on the SSD. If it dies, you can't access your stuff on the HDD side of the drive. I know it's different from SSHD, but I don't get why they opted for this idea. May be there wasn't any other option. On the other side, what the others said is true- more flash on the hybrid drives and I might consider. As of now, for me personally drives like Cruical MX 100 shake up the tree pretty good. 256GB SSD for like what? - 70 pounds?!- of course yes! Haven't seen anyone beat that- outside Black Firday deals I mean. Not even Sandisk, which are generally a budget brand for SSD's.
 
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Remember how we had razors with one blade, then two, and three, four, jokes were made about five..... then five.

"Lets strap a SSD on a Hard drive, call it revolutionary and try to PR the SHIT out of it!!!"

Or.... we could just hope MS one day moves to a better file system like the promised us with Vista that would do the same work for us, frequently accessed files moved to the higher speed drive, larger files where contiguous reads and writes are as fast or faster than the processor can handle anyway moved to the mechanical disk. Use meta data in conjunction with file storage with a smart file system......nah better scrap that project, lets make Windows 8!!!

Sorry but I just don't understand your ranting. Today, you either have massive and cheap up to 8TB HDD drives or super fast, super expensive SSD's with relatively small capacities.

Then WD comes around and brings you 4TB hybrid drive and you complain over it? WHY!? I have a home made 2TB + 32GB SSD software hybrid setup and it's fantastic. I have 2TB of storage at my fingertips with boot times and games/programs loading that nearly matches SSD drives for a fraction of the price i'd pay for 4TB SSD. How is this a bad thing!? And seeing how just 32GB cache makes a massive difference, I might just as well make a middle step purchase and get myself whis drive instead of waiting for native 2TB SSD's. Because once you want a big storage with SSD speeds, and you actually taste such setup once yourself, it's hard not to like it.

I just don't understand why they mention 128GB SSD cache and then mention just the use of 64GB. Is the other 64GB meant for overprovisioning or is there some other reason?
 

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I wish they would look a the problem differently. I want the data at the beginning of every track or track sector on the HDD to get cached. That way you can start reading data from the cache while the HDD is seeking to said track. Anything to reduce seek times on HDDs because HDDs are already really good at sequential reads and writes and the only reason random reads/writes are terrible is because of the seek time associated with the R/W head. Either that or we need to learn how to better organize data on mechanical HDDs to make sure that things that are read in a certain order are actually physically in order on the HDD to leverage those sequential read speeds.

Either way, it's all progress. I will say my wife's SSHD in her new laptop is far better than the 5400RPM HDD that is still in my laptop that I just got back from her. It's no SSD though. You know it's a SSHD when you write to it.
 
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