All joking aside, if HDDs remain relevant for bulk/lower availability storage long enough into the future, they'll eventually hit the capacity limits of current SATA/SAS connections. Especially if they scale from the 2 groups of read/write heads Seagate is currently doing toward each platter being read/writable independently and in parallel.
Being able to switch to NVME instead of needing to update the existing HDD interconnects would save a lot of work at the standardization committee level.
If "HDDs remain relevant for bulk/lower availability storage long enough into the future"...
So far SSDs are useless as long-term and even mid-term storage data. The information just fades out. So much over my grieving feelings, HDDs remain the sole large capacity (over the near eternal but only 35GB or 50GB capacity optical M-discs) retrieval medium. To have an interconnect that acknowledges this is essential.
One data point: I managed to recover the data off a TLC drive that had been powered off for 3 years, but several of the blocks that hadn't been touched since it left the factory had read errors. That puts the data retention limit somewhere near 4 years.
Another data point: I had five 1 TB WD Black HDDs I put in service in 2010. 10 years later, I checked them and got no unrecoverable reads. However, they only spent about 10% - 20% of their time spun up.
> A spinning platter of glass or rust attached to a multi-gigabit NVMe port.
Multi-gigabit isn't too fast for a HDD. The largest-capacity HDDs can certainly exceed x1 PCIe 1.0.
I can easily imagine a RAID backplane with x1 PCIe 2.0 slots for the disk drives. It would save money on SAS controllers and let the drives offer some features only found in NVMe. You could even do away with a hardware RAID controller and just do it all in software (which is what I've been doing on my small SATA RAIDs for a decade, anyhow).
Regardless of HDD performance, having your HDDs and SSDs operating on the same prototcol makes creating heterogenous storage pools much easier than juggling NVMe SSDs and SATA or SAS HDDs.
>>nothing in this update stands out as being relevant to client/consumer SSDs.
On that subject, at this point what's the main holdup on when will consumer SSDs do away with LBA abstraction for Zoned Namespaces? SSD manufacturers already have performance and financial incentives to remove the LBA layer of abstraction.
Does anyone in NVMe.org proof read these things!! The copy command is unusable in the release version. Where the "Storage Tag Check Read" STCR bit? And where is section 8.3.1.1 referred to on page 91?
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jeremyshaw - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link
3 specs that went from 1.4 to 2.0 HDMI, DP and now NVMe :DTomatotech - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link
- What’s that Dad?- Son, it’s a NVMe HDD. A spinning platter of glass or rust attached to a multi-gigabit NVMe port.
- Dad, I don’t understand?
- We had reasons, sonny, reasons.
igor velky - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link
TSMC is building processors with direct die connect of NVME flashand your telling your son about spinning disks ? WT..
baka_toroi - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link
Pay more attention. His comment was tongue in cheek because NVMe 2.0 added support for rotational media.sharathc - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
He won't. May be he is just a "troll and forget" person.mode_13h - Monday, June 7, 2021 - link
The news commenting system does tend to encourage that, mostly to its credit.ET - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
Well, son, glass is just another form of sand, like the sand used in SSDs.DanNeely - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
All joking aside, if HDDs remain relevant for bulk/lower availability storage long enough into the future, they'll eventually hit the capacity limits of current SATA/SAS connections. Especially if they scale from the 2 groups of read/write heads Seagate is currently doing toward each platter being read/writable independently and in parallel.Being able to switch to NVME instead of needing to update the existing HDD interconnects would save a lot of work at the standardization committee level.
Nexing - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
If "HDDs remain relevant for bulk/lower availability storage long enough into the future"...So far SSDs are useless as long-term and even mid-term storage data. The information just fades out.
So much over my grieving feelings, HDDs remain the sole large capacity (over the near eternal but only 35GB or 50GB capacity optical M-discs) retrieval medium. To have an interconnect that acknowledges this is essential.
Nexing - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
*25GB or 50GB capacity optical M-discsCooperdale - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
"fades out"? Can you explain that or point me to some article? I'm just ignorant, interested and worried, no sarcasm here.sheh - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
Search for: flash data retention, P/E cycles, temperature.Cooperdale - Saturday, June 5, 2021 - link
Thanks.mode_13h - Sunday, June 6, 2021 - link
In terms of P/E cycles, HDDs certainly aren't better than SSD. The strengths of HDDs lie in near-line/off-line storage and GB/$.Search for: power-off data retention.
mode_13h - Sunday, June 6, 2021 - link
One data point: I managed to recover the data off a TLC drive that had been powered off for 3 years, but several of the blocks that hadn't been touched since it left the factory had read errors. That puts the data retention limit somewhere near 4 years.Another data point: I had five 1 TB WD Black HDDs I put in service in 2010. 10 years later, I checked them and got no unrecoverable reads. However, they only spent about 10% - 20% of their time spun up.
sheh - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
Seagate's dual-actuator drives already sort of hit SATA's 6Gbps limits.Lord of the Bored - Friday, June 4, 2021 - link
"No, I mean... how do you store data on glass and rust? There's no transistors!"mode_13h - Monday, June 7, 2021 - link
> A spinning platter of glass or rust attached to a multi-gigabit NVMe port.Multi-gigabit isn't too fast for a HDD. The largest-capacity HDDs can certainly exceed x1 PCIe 1.0.
I can easily imagine a RAID backplane with x1 PCIe 2.0 slots for the disk drives. It would save money on SAS controllers and let the drives offer some features only found in NVMe. You could even do away with a hardware RAID controller and just do it all in software (which is what I've been doing on my small SATA RAIDs for a decade, anyhow).
FLORIDAMAN85 - Monday, June 14, 2021 - link
I remember asking a Tiger direct employee if I could store a ramdisk image in a x6 flash drive RAID 0 array. His head exploded.edzieba - Monday, June 7, 2021 - link
Regardless of HDD performance, having your HDDs and SSDs operating on the same prototcol makes creating heterogenous storage pools much easier than juggling NVMe SSDs and SATA or SAS HDDs.mode_13h - Tuesday, June 8, 2021 - link
Yes, and it means SATA & SAS can just be left in the past, allowing vendors to focus just on PCIe connectivity and NVMe protocol.Kougar - Thursday, June 3, 2021 - link
>>nothing in this update stands out as being relevant to client/consumer SSDs.On that subject, at this point what's the main holdup on when will consumer SSDs do away with LBA abstraction for Zoned Namespaces? SSD manufacturers already have performance and financial incentives to remove the LBA layer of abstraction.
mode_13h - Sunday, June 6, 2021 - link
> NVMe 2.0 adds a standard capacity management mechanism for endurance groups and> NVM sets to be allocated
So, like a standard way to over-provision? Neat!
Of course, I'm sure it'll only be supported on expensive datacenter drives, with like U.2 interfaces or "ruler" form factors.
a1exh - Wednesday, June 9, 2021 - link
Does anyone in NVMe.org proof read these things!! The copy command is unusable in the release version. Where the "Storage Tag Check Read" STCR bit? And where is section 8.3.1.1 referred to on page 91?