Western Digital shows off what it says is the fastest 4TB hybrid drive at Storage Visions 2015, Las Vegas-- a prototype drive featuring a SATA PCIe interface, 4TB 3.5-inch hybrid HDD and a 64GB solid state cache.
According to the company the larger cache enables the retention of hot data across multiple applications, improving overall performance. Thus WD tests saw the drive reaching near-SSD levels of performance with a PCMark8 benchmark score of 4459.
For the record, the test PC consists of an Asus Z97-A platform with a 3.4GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and 16GB RAM.
“By moving to PCI Express, the industry marries the world’s most popular storage bus with the world’s most popular computer bus," WD says. "This union provides a solid growth path to innovate new capability, while preserving the ability to plug legacy SATA drives into new SATA Express based computers.”
WD gives no details when such hybrid storage will hit the market, but expect it to do so sometime during 2015.
