SATA Express ports have appeared on 9-series Intel motherboards, and we’ve already played with one prototype storage device based on the next-gen interface. Now, another SATAe drive has appeared at the Computex show in Taiwan. This “demonstration prototype” was developed by WD, and there are two drives attached: a 4TB mechanical hard drive and a 128GB SSD.
The 3.5″ dual-drive config appears to be similar to the Black² notebook hybrid WD introduced in November. That drive combines a 1TB HDD with a 128GB SSD, each of which can be used separately. Special drivers are required to see the Black²’s mechanical component, though. The SATAe prototype uses standard AHCI drivers, suggesting its tag-team implementation is more refined.
With 1GB/s of bandwidth at its disposal, the SATAe interface should be fast enough to keep up with an SSD/HDD tandem. SATAe also has interesting potential for SSHDs that use flash memory as a cache for mechanical storage. It will be interesting to see what sorts of solutions make it to market as actual products.
Is that the standard Apple uses in the TrashcanPro with a stick-like Samsung SSD?
That is what I think will stick around, I thought it was mini-PCI, but if it’s NVM or a SATAe derivative we’re on the same page at least. Defintely small mSATA-sized SSD-on-a-stick that just plugs straight it.
I’m sorry, but that thing is fat! Would not even fit into a tray. Where would on put? On the bottom of the case?
Even worse, you can put the HD on a SATA-2 port that’s plenty fast enough for it and only use a SATA-3 port for the SSD.
You forgot to include power over the connector: eSATAep
Because it’s going to be more expensive than a 4 TB HDD + 256 GB MX100 combo.
SATAe is here to stay. SSD PCIe cards are going to be phased out in flavor of SATAe and NVM Express solutions.
SATAe native devices don’t need cabling at all. The idea is you can drop in a SATAe SSD drive directly into the SATAe port. The cabling is only there for legacy support.
SATAe cabling doesn’t even look like PATA cabling. They look like combo SATA cables (power and data in one wire) that usually come with some higher-end SATA HBA cards and hot-swappable bays.
The problem is, SATA regular cables aren’t broken so why are we fixing them?
Cost effective is using one of the 10-20 SATA cables I have lying around instead of buying new cables and drives to support them, and new motherboards. IDE was bulky and made it so we couldn’t connect many drives. This technically splits the total number of motherboard headers by two.
The thing is I can already connect a 4TB HDD and a larger SSD via 2 SATA cables and take up the same amount of space. I’m really not getting SATAe, as I could just RAID over SATA and get better performance and can put my drives where ever and not need to buy new cables. SATA is the USB of drive connectors, it doesn’t need to change. SCSI does 12Gbps over a much nicer and easier vertically stacked cable, what happened here?
Every time I see the cable solution for SATA Express it shocks me just what a kludge the whole thing is.
SATA Express isn’t going to make it – I reckon people will probably stick to the incredibly simple SATA6GB/s for drives and SSD’s are moving to a PCI-based factor anyway.
How long can those SATAe cables run? Are the connectors robust enough to be routinely handled, or would we need some sort of… eSATAe?
A few of those tie-twisters from the grocery store would help. Or you can tape the cables together.
I know it’s hidden in the box most of the time, but if you are obsessed with keeping your PC’s internal uncluttered as I do, you might understand how much it bugs me. I wonder what would happen if they twist the cables and fit them into a tube — like the late IDE cable reincarnation. That would at look much better.
I don’t understand the complaining about the SATA cables looking like IDE cables.
If it works and is cost efficient, why fix it?
For some reason I forgot about SATA Express and wondered why WD were making hybrid eSATA drives…
Not really, it looks like a SATA combo connection (power and data in one cable). The reason is because SATAe needs to retain compatibility with existing SATA hardware.
I dont even have a windowed case and i would hate that cable design.
Haha, that SATAe cable looks like a not-to-distant cousin of an oldschool IDE cable.