What just happened? Seagate showed off a hard disk drive drive that connects through NVMe at the Open Computing Project (OCP) global summit this calendar week. Limiting a faster PCIe connection to the speeds of a spinning disk drive might be counterintuitive, but it could notwithstanding have benefits exterior of consumer desktop employ.

Seagate has detailed the project on its blog, including how it works and the possible benefits. At that place'south also a dissever document that goes into more depth about the specifications. Seagate plans to make it available to customers in the coming years.

Diagrams prove the difficult bulldoze connected through PCIe3 and PCIe4, using proof-of-concept enclosures. The HDD uses native NVMe ports, but Seagate says it has "Tri-Manner" SAS, SATA, and NVMe receivers.

Seagate plans to make it available to "key customers" in September 2022, with broader availability for single and dual-port models in the eye of 2024.

The idea of an NVMe HDD may seem odd on its confront. Consumers have been moving from HDDs to SSDs because solid state engineering can read and motion data faster. The move towards connecting storage to motherboards through NVMe instead of SATA increased speeds even more. Using an NVMe connectedness for an HDD may non provide any speed benefits in comparison, and indeed Seagate's explanation doesn't mention the drive's performance at all.

Instead, Seagate claims the main benefits are cost and simplicity, especially for servers and workstations, which may still employ HDDs a lot considering they're cheaper per gigabyte than SSDs. Going from SATA to NVMe means fewer moving parts, making the drives more affordable and less prone to failure. Seagate also says these drives may scale more easily and consume less energy.