Seagate has unveiled the first ever hard disk drive (HDD) that utilizes both the NVMe protocol and a PCIe interface, which have historically been used for solid state drives (SSDs) exclusively.
As explained in a company blog post, the proof-of-concept HDD is based on a proprietary controller that plays nice with all major protocols (SAS, SATA and NVMe), without requiring a bridge.
The NVMe HDD was demoed at the Open Compute Compute Project Summit in a custom JBOD enclosure, with twelve 3.5-inch drives hooked up via a PCIe interface.