NVMe 2.0 protocol supports both PCIe-connected HDDs

Currently, the SATA 3.0 connection cannot meet the data transfer requirements of 7200 rpm HDDs. Due to the needs of the market as well as the general development trend, HDD hard drives will need to upgrade bandwidth beyond the maximum speed of SATA 3.0. This will be met when switching to PCIe connectivity with NVMe 2.0 support.

NVMe 2.0 protocol supports both PCIe-connected HDDs Picture 1

This change to NVMe 2.0 will also mark the decline of the SATA protocol in general, which has not been updated in more than 12 years. Removing SATA and switching all hard drives to a single NVMe protocol frees up space on the motherboard, simplifies connections.

Recently, Seagate also launched a new HDD with March.2 technology that can reach speeds of 524 MB/s. This is a speed that was previously only available on SSDs. In the next few years, HDDs with technology like March.2 will be very popular when the hard drive capacity exceeds the 20TB mark.

However, equipping hard drives like this is very expensive because they possess proprietary technology. Meanwhile, when NVMe 2.0 supports PCIe-connected HDD, it will help simplify the ecosystem because only one type of storage connection is needed.

Currently, there are no HDD products on the market that support NVMe, but this will happen in the near future.

David Pac

Update 07 June 2021