Are NVMe HDDs Finally Here?

Introduction to NVMe HDDs

Seagate Technology demonstrated NVMe prototype hard disk drives in conjunction with Nvidia at the 2025 Nvidia GTC. While NVMe HDDs may not dominate the market immediately, there are reasons to believe their time is coming soon. This article will explore the history of NVMe HDDs, the 2025 demonstration, and why NVMe makes sense as an HDD storage interface that will enable future HDD innovation.

History of NVMe HDDs

Seagate, WDC, Microsoft, Dell, and HP discussed NVMe HDD and even tape drives at an Open Compute Project Summit back in 2020. In late 2021, a Seagate NVMe HDD demonstration at the 2021 OCP Summit included a customized HDD enclosure with twelve 3.5-inch HDDs using a proprietary controller supporting SAS, SATA, and NVMe natively without the need for a bridge.

Benefits of NVMe HDDs

Moving to a common interface for all storage could reduce storage system complexity, enable dynamic composable storage for data centers, improve overall HDD performance, reduce overall storage system costs, and could be an important element in reducing HDD power consumption.

The 2025 GTC Demonstration

The Seagate demonstration at the 2025 GTC combined four 4TB NVMe SSDs for cache with eight 32TB HDDs for data, supplying 256TB total storage with 3GB/s data rates. This provided a performance equivalent to four 64TB SSDs at 1/6th the cost. It combined Nvidia’s BlueField DPU and Nvidia AIStore software to show how a single storage interface using NVMe can address the requirements of AI environments at lower cost than all SSD systems.

Technical Details

The image from a Seagate presentation shows a high-capacity enterprise HDD with an SSD cache, both functioning over a PCIe bus to the DPU, and a special NIC supporting remote direct memory access using NVMe-oF and AIStorage object storage with optional GPUDirect capability for the HDD data. Replacing traditional SAS or SATA HDD interfaces with native NVMe eliminates the need for additional hardware and overhead from host bus adapters, protocol bridges, and SAS infrastructure.

Future of NVMe HDDs

In a conversation after the 2025 GTC with Tom Prohofsky and Mohamad El-Batal from Seagate Technology, they mentioned that the 2025 GTC NVMe HDD demonstration was with HAMR-based Mozaic HDDs with 7nm silicon. Going to a full NVMe HDD future would lead to HDD access without a PCIe switch, further removing storage system overhead and complexity. Being able to create hardware automation with dedicated silicon used for data movement can use less power and improve communication efficiency using NVMe HDDs.

Adoption of NVMe HDDs

So, are NVMe native HDDs going to go into production soon? There are reasons why this might happen. First, HDDs are being made with higher capacity, up to 36TB today, but with more than 50TB per HDD in the next couple of years. Higher capacity is likely to drive the need for dual actuators in these big drives to improve performance, by about 2 times, to enable lower HDD rebuild times, among other advantages. Faster HDD performance could be better used in an NVMe architecture that is built around higher performance storage.

Conclusion

In conclusion, NVMe HDDs are likely to show up in some initial storage systems by the end of 2026, likely in conjunction with the introduction of dual actuator HDDs, and NVMe HDDs will dominate in enterprise and data center HDD storage by 2028. The benefits of NVMe HDDs, including reduced storage system complexity, improved performance, and lower power consumption, make them an attractive option for the future of HDD storage.

FAQs

• Q: What is NVMe HDD?
  A: NVMe HDD is a hard disk drive that uses the NVMe interface, which is a protocol designed for high-performance storage devices.
• Q: What are the benefits of NVMe HDDs?
  A: The benefits of NVMe HDDs include reduced storage system complexity, improved performance, lower power consumption, and lower costs.
• Q: When can we expect NVMe HDDs to be available in the market?
  A: NVMe HDDs are likely to show up in some initial storage systems by the end of 2026, and they will dominate in enterprise and data center HDD storage by 2028.
• Q: What is the current capacity of HDDs, and how will it change in the future?
  A: The current capacity of HDDs is up to 36TB, but it is expected to increase to more than 50TB per HDD in the next couple of years.
• Q: How will NVMe HDDs improve performance?
  A: NVMe HDDs will improve performance by using a faster interface and by enabling the use of dual actuators, which can improve performance by about 2 times.