WD Unveils PCIe Hard Drives
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.
Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

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!!!!
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...
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.
Have we got 2 or 3 hard drive manufacturers now?
2 major ones?
Yay, the competition, much hard to lead ..
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!!!!
But how you're moved between pages totally suck.
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.
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.
I completely forgot about Velociraptor and WD Red drives and I am not even an average customer lol.
I don't think they use the same PCIe as we use for graphics cards. They aren't the only type of PCIe out there.
http://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/feature-wd-prototye-sata-express-drive-benchmarked