At Computex today WD is showing off a new hard drive that makes use of a SATA Express connection. The drive is built much like the WD Black2, which we reviewed back in January. Using the SATA Express interface allows WD’s hard drive to communicate over the PCI-Express bus.
The drive itself is acutally two drives in one, so you have a 128 GB solid state drive and a 4 TB hard drive all in one. The SATA Express interface is much faster than SATA, below you can see the drive pulling 695 MB/s in a sequential test. The SATA 2 bus normally tops out around 550 MB/s.
The drive itself will have a SATA Express connector on the end and will come with a new connector that will provide a bridge between your motherboards PCI-Express slots and the connector on the drive.
This is just the start of SATA Express, but its great to see companies adopting it so early. Currently Intel’s 9-Series chipset motherboards support SATA Express.
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Images courtesy of TweakTown.
Source: TweakTown | News Archive
