#230 – Seagate NVMe Hard Drives

In this episode, Chris and Martin talk to Tim Walker and Mohamad El-Batal about the development of NVMe Hard Drives.

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In this episode, Chris and Martin discuss NVMe hard drives with Tim Walker and Mohamad El-Batal from Seagate Research. The concept behind the NVMe HDD is simple – provide a native NVMe interface to traditional enterprise nearline hard drives. Does this approach make sense and what can be gained, other than standardising on an interface? With SMR, multi-actuator and other drive technologies changing the way in which HDDs are managed, NVMe offers an interesting evolution in the medium. Tim and Mohamad walk through the logic behind designing the drive, how it is implemented and ultimately, the benefits that the design can offer. Note that these drives aren’t available yet, but are a genuine development and not just a proof-of-concept, so we can expect hyper-scale and enterprise customers to be using them in a few years’ time.

Elapsed Time: 00:40:41

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros00:02:00 – What is an NVMe Hard Drive?00:04:15 – The NVMe interface isn’t (just) for performance00:05:30 – SATA will peak at 6Gb/s00:06:30 – PCIe will dominate as the external data path00:08:15 – Consolidation for both internal and external drives will be to PCIe00:08:30 – Multi-actuator will drive a need for faster interfaces00:09:35 – Seagate has gone through four emulation steps00:11:22 – The NVMe HDD operates natively at the controller level00:12:45 – NVMe specification has added rotational drive support00:14:10 – U.3 already supports multi-protocol interfaces00:15:45 – The NVMe HDD is not just a proof of concept marketing exercise00:17:10 – Could Key value HDDs return with NVMe?00:19:00 – Is there a future for consumer HDDs?00:24:00 – Can we envision racks of Ethernet-connected HDDs?00:25:30 – HDDs could become more autonomous00:26:20 – SMR and other features could present drives “natively” to the host00:29:00 – An NVMe interface can reduce the amount of code executed00:34:00 – Will the enterprise use NVMe HDDs?00:36:05 – Device efficiency will be paramount with energy costs00:37:15 – When will devices be available for use?00:39:45 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

#229 – Exploring the PCIe 6.0 Specification with Al Yanes#54 – Are we at All-Flash and HDD Array Price Parity?#206 – An Update on NVMe 2.0 with Amber Huffman#161 – Seagate MACH.2 Dual Actuator Drive Deep Dive

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