If you need speed, you opt for an SSD. On the other hand, if you’re looking for mass storage, hard drives are very good in this area… However, their transfer rates are lower. That’s why Western Digital is working to make them faster. The company is implementing technologies that can increase transfer speeds eightfold. If all goes well, we could have hard drives that are as fast as SSDs… Well, it depends on which ones.
Hard drives as fast asSSDs atWestern Digital!Â
In order toboost hard drive speeds, the brand is trying to develop new technologies. The first is called High Bandwidth Drive. The principle is simple: put separate read and write heads on each platter to improve performance. Currently, the company is seeing a twofold increase in speeds, but ultimately, based on its roadmap, WD hopes to achieve a fourfold increase.
The other solution for boosting performance is dual pivot technology. Here, the goal is to increase the number of simultaneous read and write operations. By combining these two technologies, the brand hopes to increase hard drive performance eightfold.
In practice, we could have hard drives whose total bandwidth would saturate theSATAinterface, since the goal would be to offerHDDs reaching 2 GB/s. This would require finding an alternative to take full advantage of these devices’ speeds. Using PCIe would be one solution, for example. What’s more, if the brand manages to offer hard drives with such speeds, they will simply outperform certainPCIe 3.0 SSDs. For example, a Crucial P1 2TB offers 2 GB/s read speed versus 1.7 GB/s sequential write speed. On the other hand, maintaining high sequential speeds does not guarantee low latency or highIOPS, and this remains an intrinsic flaw of hard drives.
In short, this is news that heralds a bright future for the mechanical hard drive market. Of course, the brand must succeed in meeting its objectives in this area.