WD Unveils PCIe Hard Drives

News
By Steven Mu
published

WD is slowly making the transition to PCIe SATA Express drives.

This week, Western Digital revealed its first PCI Express hard drives at COMPUTEX in Taipei. WD's initial drive introduces the new SATA Express interface. With faster transfer speeds and reduced power consumption from these new drives, WD is leading the way once again.     

With PCI Express technology recently launched on the Intel Series 9 chipset motherboard platforms, many hard drive vendors are following suit and releasing their compatible drives. The benefits of SATA Express are the increased speeds not attainable from standard SATA interface. 

"WD has been at the forefront of SATA technology, and we see a vibrant growth path for adoption of the future SATA Express Roadmap," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president, storage technology, WD. "SATA will remain a standard for many years in many applications, and for customers who want to discuss a future beyond vanilla SATA, WD is ready to plan the future with them."

Unfortunately, WD didn't offer us any pictures. Luckily, we're dropping by the booth this week, so we'll be sure to get some photos for you.

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Steven Mu
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16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • MANOFKRYPTONAK
    Interested to see how much performance boost these get. Are these a new thing?
    Reply
  • Emerald
    Hardware manufacturer are switching drives from SATA to the new PCIe SATA Express standard
    Reply
  • thundervore
    Nice. Now all WD marketing have to do is confuse the hell out of it customers with naming these drives.

    Its bad enough we have WD Black (enterprise), WD Green (low power), WD Blue (normal), and now WD Purple (DVR / Video survalance). Now SSD too.

    Toms really need to fix their comment system!!!!
    Reply
  • Nice. Now all WD marketing have to do is confuse the hell out of it customers with naming these drives.

    Its bad enough we have WD Black (enterprise), WD Green (low power), WD Blue (normal), and now WD Purple (DVR / Video survalance). Now SSD too.
    4 colors are too complicated for you? What would you say about Intel's nomenclature then...
    Reply
  • 11796pcs
    Nice. Now all WD marketing have to do is confuse the hell out of it customers with naming these drives.

    Its bad enough we have WD Black (enterprise), WD Green (low power), WD Blue (normal), and now WD Purple (DVR / Video survalance). Now SSD too.

    Toms really need to fix their comment system!!!!

    Hopefully this isn't a double post.
    You forgot Black2, Se, Re, Xe, AV, and the VelociRaptor drives and these drives that confuse the Hell out of me: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/retailkits/

    Here's WD's full catalog: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/catalog/

    There must be specialized firmware in each of the product lines. Still, I have difficulty believing hard drives can that significantly different from each other.
    Reply
  • pjmelect
    The trouble with using PCIe is that very few computers have free PCIe slots that are not already taken or obstructed by graphics cards.
    Reply
  • Johan Kryger Haglert
    Leading the way?

    Have we got 2 or 3 hard drive manufacturers now?

    2 major ones?

    Yay, the competition, much hard to lead ..
    Reply
  • Johan Kryger Haglert
    Nice. Now all WD marketing have to do is confuse the hell out of it customers with naming these drives.

    Its bad enough we have WD Black (enterprise), WD Green (low power), WD Blue (normal), and now WD Purple (DVR / Video survalance). Now SSD too.

    Toms really need to fix their comment system!!!!
    I don't agree with anything except the latest.

    But how you're moved between pages totally suck.
    Reply
  • lp231
    WD Drives aren't confusing, Those color naming scheme are basically for consumers, while the rest is for enterprise.
    Consumer side:
    Velociraptor=10K rpm drive
    Black=Performance
    Blue=Mainstream
    Green=Power Saver
    Red=NAS
    Purple=DVR survalance
    Any other drives like, SE, RE, RE3, XE are enterprise drives and they don't use color schemes.
    Reply
  • knowom
    I won't buy another WD HD I've had 3 fail out of like 5 to hell with that piss poor reliability record in my experience with them on top of that SSD's just are a crap load better than rotating mechanical HD's.
    Reply