WD Is Preparing World Fastest 4TB Hybrid Drive

Las Vegas is a busy place this time of year with the CES event. But there also are a lot of smaller events in the city surrounding CES and one of them is the Storage Visions Conference. Western Digital is presenting their new 4TB Hybrid Drive that utilises the SATA Express PCI-e interface to make the world’s fastest hybrid drive and bring down the costs per GB.

The demonstrated models are using 64GB SSD cache sizes, but WD said that the final models will be made available with up to 128GB cache. Having such a cache increases the data access rate for hot data significantly and improves the overall performance. The WD SATA Express 4 TB drive with 64 GB cache achieved a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4459 and these drives perform close to 10Gbit/s in striped RAID setups.

“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.”

I can not wait for these prototype drives to become a reality, bringing down the overall costs for fast storage – for everyone.

Thanks to WD for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of WD