Western Digital (WD) reports that its upcoming 4TB hybrid drive is the world’s fastest such device, and the unit will be demonstrated this coming Sunday and Monday in Las Vegas at the SATA-IO booth at Storage Visions 2015, an adjunct conference to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The company claims that the drive, which fuses a modest-capacity SSD with a higher-capacity traditional hard disk, brings near-SSD speeds to consumers, with the dramatically-lower cost-per-GB of spinning platter drives.
The prototype drive utilizes the SATA Express PCI-e interface, a 4TB 3.5-inch hard drive, and up to a 128GB solid state drive geared towards desktop and gaming applications. In WD’s labs, the new drive with 64GB cache achieved a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4459, demonstrating near-SSD performance.
“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.” said Gary Meister, WD’s senior vice president of engineering. “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.”
Pricing is not yet available. Also unknown is when the drive will ship in quantities to retail.
