What do you guys think? Seagate-debuts-NVMe-HDD-technology-at-OCP

Seems like it overly complicates hooking up more 3.5" HDDs on a consumer system, but I suppose we'll find out where it goes.
 
Looks like they are trading controllers for PCIe lanes. Sounds to me like a good way to make inexpensive things expensive (PCIe switches are not cheap). This may or may not be interesting in the server world, I don't see it having any impact on desktops / workstations.
 
Imagine how annoying it would be to not be able to electronically disable your HDDs from the bios.
 
evilmedic said:
I think they are preparing for the end of SAS and SATA interface.
Click to expand...
Maybe SAS more than SATA. Based on the other comments above, which have been very informative (y) I'm guessing that SATA will persist until all consumer system storage transitions to NVMe, but that's not right away. And then what happens to Seagate and WD? Do they become like the companies that made film cameras but didn't transition successfully to digital? Pentax? Minolta? Mamiya? Hasselblad? Not to overlook Kodak itself.
 
In an enterprise setting it makes a lot of sense, simplifying the stack. There are some new PLX switch chips coming out that are cheaper and more configurable (eg you can take a x16 PCIe lane structure and act as a "switch" which could break out a PCIe 5 x16 to 16 x1 (or on the newest PLX coming 32 x.5) lanes which are good for 4GB/s each x1 or 2GB/s x.5. This is more than you would ever need for spinning rust (at current or even announced/expected near future technology.) There will be SAS-like fabric typologies as well, this all just removes some of the overhead.
 
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